Why You Should Time Batch Similar Creative Work
After writing, shooting, and editing our first video sketch, I’ve learned something you can steal:
Batch similar creative work together.
Here’s why, using the steps of my process so it’s clear.
Step 1. Write the sketch.
For this first sketch, the writing process was very informal.
It was a few jotted notes my wife took down when she had the idea for a parody sketch poking fun at celebrity “everyday” skincare lines where the celebrity hawking the product can’t even bear to put it on her face.
Boom. Step one finished in about 15 minutes.
Step 2. Shoot the sketch.
Then comes the shooting phase.
This took longer than the writing phase, in part because we were working off notes instead of a full script, and much of the video was improvised.
So we basically pushed the time we could have spent getting a tight script in the first step into the second step.
It worked fine, especially once we got specific on the beats of the video.
Boom. Step two finished in about an hour.
Step 3. Edit the sketch.
This was the longest and most tedious part of the process. And it always is. When I worked in the edit bay in my reality TV days (Ice Road Truckers, anyone?!), 12 hours melted away in what felt like minutes.
This sketch took about six hours to edit. Partly because I haven’t edited anything in almost a decade and it took some time to get comfortable again.
And partly because we weren’t super organized in the writing or shooting stage where preparation saves time in the edit bay.
But finally, I got to the finish line on a 1m 30s video in about seven hours from concept to product.
And something became very clear:
This sh*t was taking far too long for the output to be only a single video.
We need to write more than one sketch at a time, shoot more than one sketch at a time, and edit more than one sketch at a time.
So that’s the new plan…
Doing provides more feedback than planning.
I couldn’t have known to batch similar creative work ahead of time.
Well, I kind of did cause I wrote about time-chunking before, but a lesson isn’t truly learned until it’s lived. And for some reason, it’s hard to transfer knowledge between domains.
Either way, you learn far more in doing than in planning.
This is a universal law of life - like compound interest or mirrored reciprocation (if I smile at you, you’ll smile back).
That’s why I make stuff and figure it out as I go.
There is no perfect way. There is only doing, learning, and improving.
You don’t learn from planning. And even worse, it feels good to plan.
It gives you the same dopamine hit that finishing a book or bookmarking a Twitter thread does. If feels like you have really done something.
Well, you haven’t.
Go make something and learn as you go.
Because when you take that step, something amazing happens: the world rewards you for your courage.
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.” - Terence McKenna
Start now. And thanks for reading.