Four years of checking an app every ten minutes.
Ok, maybe every fifteen minutes. Thirty, if I was lucky.
That’s a long time to have your working - and, often, personal - life ruled by an app.
Any YouTubers reading this will know exactly which app I’m referring to. It’s one of the first you install on a new smartphone. It immediately makes its way to prime thumb-targeted space on the first app page. You know how it works like the back of your hand. You could operate it with your eyes closed.
Open. Pull to refresh.
Celebrate.
Close.
Do something else.
Open. Pull to refresh.
Feel marginally depressed.
Etcetera.
YouTube Studio is an absolute pain in the arse for creators. And I’ve discovered that it is completely, utterly, biblically pointless. You do not need it in your life - even if your YouTube channel is the thing that holds your entire business together.
I wish someone had told me what I’m about to tell you, several years ago.
The YouTube game is all about numbers, but that isn’t any different to other businesses I’ve worked in. Numbers indicate how well you’re doing, where you’re failing, and where the opportunities lie - we’re just lucky that, as YouTubers, there are so many numbers to dig into.
Those numbers are, consequently, incredibly important and they should drive a lot of the decisions we make. The challenge is that their importance is often placed above everything else. The performance of yesterday’s video, consequently, ends up weighing on your mind far more greatly than the most important task on your to-do list for today.
That’s not right. Your focus should be on today’s important task - not what a newly published video is doing right now.
Similarly, one’s subscriber count dictates a whole host of things. As it grows, YouTube pats you on the back at predetermined intervals by sending a plaque in the post. Brands begin to spot you and send you free products and opportunities to work with them on a paid basis. You get invited to events. You start sharing air space with creators you spent years watching from afar. Your subscriber count is critical, no matter how arbitrary it might be.
But do you need to know how many new subs you’ve picked up in the last hour? The last day? The last week? No, you don’t - yet, that didn’t stop me from checking my subscriber number constantly throughout the day.
Open. Pull to refresh.
Thinking about it now makes me feel slightly embarrassed. It was such a poor use of my time. An inevitable poor use of my time which is, I think, a rite of passage for any creator, but a poor use of my time, regardless.
I hired an assistant recently who looks after my email inbox and calendar. This means I don’t check email throughout the day. I only look at it when she tells me to, which is, at most, a couple of times each day. Everything else in between gets managed for me - because I don’t need to get involved. It’s been a learning curve and I have, on a couple of occasions, fallen off the wagon, but two weeks in, I have successfully released myself from the grasp of email for good and the time and headspace I’ve gained in return is unbelievable.
Getting rid of YouTube Studio has been far easier. I don’t miss it one bit. I have no urge whatsoever to go back to the pull-to-refresh days. More importantly, I’ve realised something.
YouTube Studio is utterly pointless.
No, really. You can get everything you need from the web app - and more (it offers far more detailed reporting than the mobile version). My new routine sees me heading into YouTube Studio on my Mac twice weekly for around thirty minutes each time. That’s it. During those sessions, I check video performance and sift through the comments section. As a result, I get a far more interesting picture of what’s going on with recently published videos, and dealing with comments becomes enjoyable rather than frustrating. Trust me - when you check comments irregularly, binning the idiots becomes as transactional and emotionally vacant as putting the bins out. The same can’t be said if you’re checking those comments throughout the day; you’re rarely ready to deal with what comes your way in those instances.
We also have a bi-weekly stats review as a team, which is even more insightful. Gaining perspective on how the channel is performing across an entire month - rather than every ten minutes - gives me far more to go on as the business owner. It also means I’m detached from the numbers daily, which means I can get on with stuff that drives those numbers. It’s stupidly simple when you think about it.
If you’re a YouTuber and you’re similarly addicted to YouTube Studio as I once was, just delete it. Now. Seriously. Don’t even give it a second thought. I promise that you won’t miss it at all. It’s the best thing I’ve done so far this year.