I'm happy to come back to this community to tell you about my hours spent on Steemit last week. Last time I made a review of a café & bar in my hometown, Cumaná, Venezuela; you can seei HERE.

And you can read about this contest HERE, and perhaps you will join in. I invite @ylene74, @diusma16, and @juichi to participate.

I have two jobs, one from Monday through Friday and one during the weekend. The first takes 40 hours of my time. The second takes approximately 20 hours. This means I work 60 hours a week approximately. Some weeks are light, some are really heavy and demanding.

How many hours can I devote to Steemit?

48 hours a week.

A day has 24 hours. Ideally, I should sleep 8 hours—I don’t (ever)—. But this means I have 16 hours to use every day, which makes 112 a week. Now having to work 60 hours a week outside Steemit, mandatorily, I should have 52 hours “free” to live and work on my Steemit blog + the moderation of social media for SteemFoods. Let’s say, I spend an average of 4 hours a day on Steemit, regularly: 28 hours (more than half of my time out of work outside Steemit).

With the Challenge, these hours have doubled, which means I’ve been sleeping less hours than I should. Being 48 hours on Steemit, I get only 4 hours a week to take a shower, cook, eat, watch TV, share with my family. This also meas that many times I have an eye on a screen and the other on my family: human and animal.

11 active posts...

I have 11 active posts as of today. I try to keep my daily entries to the Food Diary Game. I even made my debut in the Diary Game. And I don't make a post in half an hour. Sometimes it takes me 2 hours to edit the text and photos I will use. I choose not to botch the job.

Screen Capture from my Steemworld Page

Last Week on Steemit

In the first and second week of the Engagement Challenge, I wasn't sure if we moderators had to participate in the contests. It seemed like an outrage to me. I mean, how was I going to deal with the dozens of questions and requests from users every day, plus comment on their posts, plus attend to my own blog? I was out of sync, my head dulled, totally. The second week was no better. But by the third week, I was able to complete 6 of the 7 contests. The problem? My work sucked up most of my time over the weekend, and I was barely able to complete my last entry.

Week 3 was better than week 1 and 2 for me, but the amount of hours I had to be on the computer or smartphone is something I couldn't sustain over time.

At the end of the post to participate in the contest, also write your opinion about the benefits of the Steemit Engagement Challenge and your suggestions to improve this challenge in the next period. (Source)

Benefits of the Engagement Challenge

Users have been trained to do what they have always been supposed to do: take care of their blogs. We are supposed, and I always tell everyone, that we should manage our blog as if it were our home: take good care of our visitors, pay attention to them and interact with them, i.e. we should answer their comments. And whoever visits you, you thank them by also visiting and interacting with them, i.e. we also make a comment on their blog/post.

In general, users have learned to read, actually read the posts and make meaningful comments.

Everything is perfectible in this world of humans.

I saw, for example, that in my particular case, I had to spend a lot of time guiding users and reading and commenting on posts, which prevented me from participating as much as I wanted to through my posts. In other words, this Engagement Challenge marginalized the moderators, since it did not consider that we have less time and more obligations within Steemit to take care of the regular activity of our blog plus an extra daily contest.