Improving My Curation Strategy To Cover More Ground & Motivate More People

Following my own advice in my post about not tying your upvote value with your perceived worth, I'm going to focus on upvoting more people more often.

I need to spread out my voting power more efficiently, something I've always struggled with.

I tend to manually upvote with too much weight to try to pass along as much SP as I can to those who I follow most, or when Steemit's content feed displays something of high quality (gasp). I also have SteemAuto set up for 29 authors, which I leave running when my SP is reasonably charged. On top of that, I upvote almost every comment I get.

This saps up a ton of my voting power before I'm left trying to squeeze out support for others I have to manually hunt around for or visit. I tend to leave the newer creators hanging a bit, but not on purpose. What I've realized is that I should be prioritizing support for as many people as possible, versus as much quality support as I can for those who I normally gravitate toward.

While good intentioned, my prior approach shoots me in the foot because I tend to shut down on curating to let it recharge for the next round. I've typically passed on voting someone at 5%-10% because I don't want to insult them that I thought it wasn't worth more. I sort of put myself in my own penalty box to impede me from curating naturally.

This is a ball and chain I don't want anymore because I like giving new people encouragement and engagement. It's also good for growing and maintaining new relationships around here to continue my own development.

The only way I can see myself fixing it is to vote lighter so my voting power reaches further.

As someone who's struggled for a long time on Steemit until recently (thanks to a few selfless people who have helped me bump up a notch), I know how important any vote and comment can be when they're often hard to come by. It's rewarding to reach more like-minded people and have a dialogue sparked about a passion or belief, so I need to adjust to facilitate more of this.

...One key point here is that I'm not concerned with my curation kickback aside from one or two key curation targets I maintain, which I may need to drop. I also rarely self-vote these days. I'm concerned with having voting power to reach more people in the most meaningful way I can. I'm simply reminding myself that my SP shouldn't hold me back from that.

Thoughts? Similar struggles? Advice?

Thank you,
@steemmatt

^{If anyone catches this and notices a dip in their "usual" vote, it's nothing personal. Just trying to help more so we all benefit in the long run.}