The idea is to consume all your voting power which is replenished back in a given time. It doesn't matter how much vote-weight you use or how many times you vote. Following points should be taken care of:
- VP is continuously being replenished irrespective of your voting activity roughly at the rate of 0.8333333% of your current VP. So we should vote considering our activity & inactivity level.
- More your VP, the faster (& higher in absolute terms) is the rate of replenishment. So if you want to make out the maximum advantage of it, your best bet is to keep your VP at 100% and make one 100% upvote every 2.4 hours precisely 😉
- You are human and not a machine. So don't act at machine precision. Be human and act human. Take into account your inactivity stretch and roughly calculate how much it would be able to replenish at most during that time to make it to 100% again. Always stay below that level so that you don't ever reach 100%. Once you reach your 100% VP, you are not being replenished or given any extra VP. So it's a total waste of your replenishing quota if you are at 100%VP even for a moment.
- Consider how much curation reward you earn in general. Mostly it's a very tiny percentage of your author rewards and you can let it go. So don't overthink of curation and just behave as a human unless you are a bot whose aim is to earn through curation only.
- Most people get less than 15% curation rewards of their total earned rewards. So if you are earning 500 dollars a month than share of curation is less than 75 dollars. And by all these calculations and discipline of abiding your voting according to it, 75 won't become 100. It may just make a difference of a couple of dollars at best.
What I want to convey is that this whole discussion around VP is not really of any considerable value. Just continue to make a good judgement keeping broadly everything else in mind. You can check your own curation rewards are less than 1% of your author rewards so far despite your maintaining over 80% VP. Whereas I don't care about my VP but yet my curation reward percentage is comparable to yours at 1.79%. Even @timcliff's curation reward percentage is about 10% of his total rewards. So guess how much is at stake?