Project Updates #1

Today’s blog post is going to be slightly different from the previous few and will read more like a journal entry. I’m toying with this as a bit of a mini-series as work on projects and have interesting stories to share it might be good to create some kind of continuity between random updates.

It’ll also be a bit shorter of a post since it got a bit late and only writing about abstract ideas can get tiresome. However I do have a banger of an idea for my next post, so stay tuned.

I have a fairly sophisticated system for keeping track of my daily tasks, making sure I get through things on my to-do list and tracking ideas for personal projects. Looking at it now I wish I had this system when I was in college since I constantly felt like I was struggling to stay organized.

Part of the beauty of the system is that it’s constantly evolving. It’ll get more complex and then I’ll simplify it and iterate on it. It’s never perfect, and not only is that okay, it’s what allows it to be anti-fragile. Meaning if I ever stop using it, it’s easy to drop right back in and pick up where I left off.

I try to apply a lot of my knowledge about data structures and system architecture to break down projects into smaller subtasks. Using this system also helped me develop patience for working on things that can’t get crossed off immediately but need me to take some action.

Today I finally got all my footage from the past year organized and it felt amazing. A huge part of being able to put out the kinds of videos I want to make quickly is just having all your videos labeled and organized. I like to go roughly in chronological order and then group footage by camera, which I think is pretty standard practice, but I also don’t know for sure since I’m largely self-taught. And having come from a largely self-taught coding background, this has its pros and cons.

On the one hand, you learn a lot, and more importantly, you develop the confidence you need to go out and try new things. But most importantly you learn how to learn through trial and error, defining problems, finding solutions, and constantly trying to improve at your craft.

But on the other hand, you may end up developing anti-patterns that will slow you down. For example, I still feel like I’m not using my editing software to its fullest and that I could probably speed up my turnaround time. Not only would this improve the quality of my edits, but also make the whole thing more enjoyable since I could create things way more quickly. Right now I’m just slow because I never formally took the time to learn an end-to-end process from a tried and true template.

Something I also had to learn very early on was just how much data editing these videos takes up. I realized very quickly that I would need external hard drives, and not long after that I realized I would need a way to create backups of those hard drives in case one crashed. You end up learning a lot about the tech that way.

I even ended up helping a friend who thought he had lost all his data in a faulty hard drive. I recommended some software that helped me when I was in a similar situation and turns out it worked. It’s nice to be helpful, but it’s only something you learn through practicing your craft.

It’s hard to describe how good it felt to get all of that done today. It had been stressing me out for weeks and I knew it was blocking me from editing my next batch of videos. I knew I would need to clear up space and get things organized before I could start editing.

Because of this momentum, I ended up also getting a bunch done around my place and setting up this new plant corner in my bedroom. It made me much happier than I expected for some reason, and I’m excited to keep adding to it and to see it in the daylight. My bedroom has been in need of some green.

I guess this is what Alex Hormozi was talking about during his podcast with Chris Williamson and how once you complete one task you tend to knock a bunch out in a row right after.

All in all, I’d say I’m off to a great head start on my New Year's resolutions. It’ll be nice to start the year off with a clear mind and clear intentions. Also if there’s one habit that I’d like to take away from this experience it’s just offloading my footage from my phone to a hard drive at the end of every day, or every week at the very least so it doesn’t become super complicated down the line. The longer you wait to do it, the more technical debt you build up.