This past weekend did not go exactly as planned. Thursday night I was up until after midnight finishing up the touches needed for releasing the latest video (which, incidentally, thank you all for the support. People have really been entertained by Ron, and that makes me happy). Friday nights are a night off to spend with my wife. Then the original plan was Saturday, with my wife working that day, I would head to my favorite coffee shop and GET SHIT DONE. Plow through that to-do list; update those mug templates, bash out that synopsis, write the next video, plan the next video shoot, start filming, oh yeah, work on my book, update this website, sketch the new few blog posts…
Spoiler alert: none of that happened.
I napped, I played on my phone. I ran a few adulting errands, and then otherwise I didn’t do much. Similarly Sunday afternoon when I had a few hours to knock stuff out, I sat down and napped and watched two more episodes of The Witcher.
Thus, when a friend asked me “Tell me all the productive things you did this weekend,” I rather despondently decreed “I didn’t do anything but take naps and chill out watching Netflix.” Their reply: “So you rested. Yay!”
This is an important reminder to me as much as anyone else out there who needs to hear this: resting counts. It counts as doing stuff, and it matters. This is something I intellectually knew, but whew did it take this little reminder at a good time.
Another Realization
Pondering the import of rest, one thing jumped out at me: part of why I felt like crap about this was because I HAVE TO MAKE ANOTHER VIDEO. I HAVE TO FILM THIS WEEKEND SO I CAN GET STARTED ON THE EDITS WHICH MEANS I NEED TO WRITE THE NEXT SCRIPT AND BRAINSTORM FUN SHOTS AND and and and and….
I didn’t want to skip a week again. My video about the decade in writing was SUPPOSED to go up on the second; it went up on the 10th instead. My video about selling mistakes was supposed to go up the 14th, then the 21st, and then it ended up going live the 24th. I even said in my yearly goals that I wanted to make weekly videos – was I already falling apart? And then I had a realization…
What if they’re not weekly videos I’m bad at, but they’re bi-weekly videos I take my time on?
-Me, this weekend. Ish.
I cannot articulate quite how much of a paradigm this shift is. I’ve literally ALWAYS thought my YouTube channel was a weekly channel, and I’ve always beaten myself up for being bad at making weekly videos consistently. The most I’ve ever managed is 3 weeks in a row before starting to slip and fall behind.
I also worried this was just me being lazy. After NaNoWriMo I seriously considered making TWO videos a week. To go from that to one video a week, to this, how did I know I wasn’t just bailing on my follow through? Especially because, look, I’m trying to grow my channel. Frequency of posting does seriously matter because I can see traffic start to dip off significantly when I don’t have a video coming out.
So I looked at data (if you didn’t think I would both have data to look at and give it scrupulous examination… I mean, you must be new here. Welcome!). There were some interesting bits of data that I got from it.
- I don’t Post Weekly. Literally the most I’ve managed to post in successive weeks is about 3 or 4 weeks in a row, and even on those later weeks videos were going up later in the week and not, as I originally planned, Tuesdays.
- I did get sucked in. When I did work on videos, especially bigger video projects, what tended to happen was I got completely sucked into a video project. The Wheel of Time videos I made in August are a big reason why I didn’t write that much in August. Similarly, in October I was so busy throwing together the Quick n’ Dirty novel prep videos that I didn’t do hardly any pre-writing on the project I was ostensibly going to be working on. In all these cases I’d get sucked in trying to churn out videos that my writing would get shoved to the side for 2 or 3… or 4 or 5 days.
- Videos do take time. I’ve been clear to myself for a long time that I want to bring cinematography to Booktube / Authortube. I don’t want to just be a talking head in front of a static background. That means the last few videos have been very ambitious and then end up taking a lot of time. The decade video? That was over 13 hours to script, plan, shoot, and edit. Sales mistakes? That was sixteen hours. To produce that video in a week that’s literally over two hours a day every single day, on top of a day job, going to the gym, spending time with my wife, and, oh, working on a book.
And look, even sitting here re-reading these numbers the hustler part of my brain is going “I mean, that just means spend 4 hours each day of the weekend. Bam. You got most of the way there. You want it, just DO IT.”
The fact is, however, I can’t. Not sustainably. Not with any semblance of balance between the myriad projects I have on my many plates. And I definitely couldn’t keep creating videos of this higher quality that I enjoy. And… that’s okay?
Actually, it’s more than okay. It’s liberating. I didn’t realize how much stress I was carrying with me this weekend until I sat around and decided I didn’t need to bust my ass to get a video out the 31st. I needed to rest to keep myself recharged, and that was enough.
So Now What?
Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. I’m in this for the long game and I have many more videos to make. Still, for the interim, my videos are now going to be released every two weeks (so the next video is targeted to drop February 7th). I might occasionally have bonus content to throw up on an off week, but that’s just a bonus.
Nothing is set in stone. I’m constantly learning and improving my skills, so maybe I’ll reach a point in my production workflow where I can get these 16 hour videos down to 6. But that’s not where I’m at now. I’m going to make these videos biweekly and I won’t feel guilty about it, best practices be damned.
More importantly, I’m also going to keep reminding myself: I need to make time to rest. Because that counts. That’s doing something productive, just like all the other things on the to do list count for.
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