Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Video log – How to design your environment (for better habits)

I just posted a video about habits and designing your environment. I tried relating the environment to different things in Mario and using visuals from the game to illustrate some tips about environment design.

I planned to use examples from multiple games when I started. But as I was making the visuals it just sort of worked out to where I was just using one game. And now the retro…

What went well?

  • I put the visuals together in small parts during the week. I remembered to record draft run-throughs along the way. This always helps to see if the structure makes sense and if I need more examples or if I can start cutting things down. One big thing was realizing I needed way more stills since I wasn’t animating anything.
  • Just publishing again was good. Trying to get back into the groove of publishing regularly.
  • Got some extra motivation after recording a podcast with Wally this week and creating a mini challenge for ourselves to do 3 videos this month
  • Using stills and not doing transitions between the slides might be worth the trade-off of losing some slightly interesting visual elements. The upside is being able to clean up all of the word gaps in the audio really quickly. I was able to use Descript to remove the gaps without worrying that I would be cutting the clip in the middle of a transition.
  • I tried to spend a little more time on the thumbnail than I usually do. Some of that was inspired by listening to MrBeast interviewed by MKBHD on the WVFRM podcast. He talks about spending hours thinking of thumbnails and titles.

Tracing thumbnail

 

What could be improved?

  • The visuals aren’t great. There are moments in the video where it’s just sitting on a single visual for longer than I’d like.
  • I didn’t put any book quotes in here at all. I could have pulled some in from Designing Your Life or Atomic Habits or any of the habits books really. We’ll see how the videos does. Pulling the quotes in afterward can take long because it requires hunting them down and then deciding between a few different ones to reflect the idea that I’m talking about.
  • The premise just could have been better. I do wish I used more examples from different games. Something like Super Mario Maker clips could have been better (since it’s all about directly designing environments), but it’d take much much longer to make the video if I used actual game clips. Maybe something to try for a future video.

What will you try next time?

  • I want to continue with doing the visuals in Figma. It’ll make it easy to re-use parts from different videos and copy and paste things. It’s a little cumbersome inserting or arranging slides since they’re Figma frames. That’d be really easy in Keynote or Slides, but I’ll get faster at doing it in Figma so I’m not too worried about it.
  • I think this could be one of those decisions that compounds over time. If I can build up a library of reusable pieces for presentations for the videos, then I’ll be able to do things like create component for three slides that show a timeline. I could do that with themes and styles in Keynote but it’s just not as lightweight a system as components in Figma.

74: We’re back (pt VII) x 2021 Goals

Okay we hit RECORD again finally. Kicking off 2021. We talk about some of our goals

  • Fitness goals
  • Creation goals
  • Personal goal

We’ll be making videos in 2021 and sharing our progress as we go.

Video log – How to stay creative (when low on time)

I just posted a video about habits. I thought it’d be good to do I retro for each of the videos I make. I’ll just start with one before I get too crazy about doing this for every single video. First, here’s the video: “Staying Creative While Low on Time”

What went well?

I made this in pieces — That went successfully for the first time in a while. The definition of success here is just finishing it at all. I’ve done this before where I try to make a video and chunks and then do different pieces and sometimes I’ll even put some of it together before eventually abandoning it.

Stuck to 3 quotes and that was it — I can often go a little overboard trying to find enough quotes and examples for different topics. This always leads to bloat and makes it less likely that I’ll finish the videosI’m trying to make. Even with just three, this video is probably 2 or 3 minutes too long.

I drew one set of 8 images in 15 minutes sessions — This was good for just working towards something where I can find time to contribute to a larger project every day. 15 minutes is a good chunk.

This is a quote from Creative Calling by Chase Jarvis, way talks about the 5-day process:

Instead, stick to a simple, repeatable process:
Day 1: Finish one piece of creative work today, without judgment—whether it’s a story, a photo, or a minimum viable product. Just complete the work, create it quickly, and be good with it.
Day 2: Iterate on the work you did yesterday. Do a new draft or update the old one. Put the photo into Photoshop and make it better, add some polish to the lines of yesterday’s poem; just take yesterday’s baseline and make it better.
Day 3: Repeat Day 2.
Day 4: Repeat Day 3.
Day 5: Decide it’s good enough and move on. It’s not perfect, not ideal, but damn, it’s pretty good, right? Good enough to put out into the world.

What could be improved?

There was a time that I got a comment and I skimmed it and I saw the word “mate”. What I thought as someone was addressing me as a mate with some encouragement but then when I actually read the comment it said that I should have some yerba mate tea.

This video kind of has that issue as well. I recorded in kind of a low-energy state while sitting. I’ll probably be more wary of that next time. I want to bring too much energy but I need to bring some energy.

What to try next time?

First, I’ll try to record standing. I’ll also continue to try this format with 8 panels. I do want to do something where I take the blue vector imagery I’ve been experimenting with on Twitter and try to do a video in that style.

I also will try to get back to a weekly cadence for videos. I want to not care about metrics and things like that. At the same time it would be nice to get to 1000 subscribers. I think that’d be a nice number to feel like I’m not quite shouting into the void.

And it’s a good time to link to MKBHD’s video where he is so grateful to have 74 subscribers after 100 videos. One of the best ways to show my 500 subscribers that I’m grateful is to make more videos of higher quality.

Oh yah…

Another thing that went well was introducing Booster, our new puppy.

Midnights with Booster

I’m just going to free write here real quick until I figure out something to draw tomorrow. It should be a single idea worth sharing from something in my information diet recently.

Maybe it could be that writing advice about being able to both paint a character in a corner and also give them a way out. It’s from The Connect, where they talk about Training Day and Denzel is a bully moments.

But it’s about the scene with the shotgun and the bath tub. There seems like no way out for Ethan Hawk.

This came to mind when I was catching up on The Mandalorian and Oberyn gets caught in the cell.

So maybe I can draw The Mandalorian in a cell with a pen or pencil or something representing writing to get out of there. Or Houdini in the water trap with only a typewriter to escape.

Notes on visual notes (as I try to learn in public)

I have a couple weeks off where I wanted to batch a year of weekday tweets. This seemed somewhat doable and I got a head start leading up to it.

Figma

Then we got a puppy.

I scaled back the goal a bit from 250 of these (1 for every weekday in a year) to 100. Which might still be possible, but I’ll probably scale down further.

Having the buffer of scheduled posts is good, but the buffer should be the fall back for when I can’t make a daily post. 

There are a couple things I’ll need to do to maintain a consistent posting schedule:

  • (A) Build a system to execute from start to finish on a single idea each day — Ideally I’d be able to get to where I can share a note every day with something like a 30 minute block of time. It should basically be purely the execution portion. I also need to be disciplined in respecting the time block. Some posts will be better than others. All are a step toward improvement.
  • (B) Build a system to batch parts of the process — Whatever I can do to get started on (A) right away every day that I sit down to make something. If I have 30 minutes blocked off, I shouldn’t spend 25 minutes choosing a quote. Or spend 15 minutes finding and transcribing a sentence from a podcast.

If I have a longer block of time, I can repeat (A) to increase the buffer.

This doesn’t quite fit in time to share the process, but things like screen recording and using Procreate timelapses could help make that more of a passive process.

Okay I should probably get back to actually working on this instead of writing about working on this.

More thoughts soon!

Book Notes: “The Practice” by Seth Godin

Check out the full notes for “The Practice” by Seth Godin

I made a few videos about Seth Godin’s latest book, “The Practice”. I know it’s probably useful to put the videos I make on my site as well, but just haven’t done it. Same with the podcast and things like that. I want to start making sure that this is one place to get all the things that I’m making. But one step at a time.

So here’s the video I put together about “The Practice”.

A decent chunk of the time was putting the Leatherface illustration together. Here’s a timelapse of that. I use Figma a lot for work  and thought it could be a nice flywheel opportunity to also start learning to do some digital illustrations.

2020 12 06 timelapse 2020 12 06 20 00 18

This, of course, isn’t good quality but I’m sharing now in hopes that I get better and can share that journey. The whole “learn in public” thing.

Oh yeah so I made a few other videos about “The Practice” in an attempt to do some shorts. These are about one minute each.

This one is about desirable difficulty — Desirable difficulty is finding the right level to practice at. Example I have is table tennis but I think I’m more common one would be regular tennis. If you play regular tennis with someone who is much much better than you then it can be pretty frustrating for both sides. If the opponent is much worse than you’re not learning anything because you aren’t challenged. If the opponent is much better than you and then you’re not learning anything because you don’t have the opportunity to get quality reps.

This one is about constraints creating creativity — Constraints creating creativity is an idea that constraints are the only way to lead to creativity. An element of creativity is finding solutions within the constraints that you’re given. I don’t mention it in the video but one thing I have been looking back to you as a tool lately is Crazy 8s. It’s where you try to sketch out 8 solutions to a problem in 8 minutes. Systemizing the constraints of time and also tools (a Sharpie works well here) allows you to focus on finding creative solutions rather than making the image pretty.

This one is about doing the work without waiting for flow —This topic reminded me of a couple other writers’ thoughts on not relying on perfect conditions. Ryan Holiday writes about not relying too much on routine and discipline:

Discipline is a form of freedom, but left unchecked becomes a form of tyranny.So the key is the ability to rotate from routine to routine, discipline to discipline, according to the needs of the day and the moment.

And in an appearance on Tim Ferriss’s podcast, Josh Waitzkin talks about deliberately practicing in chaos:

So, from a young age when I started playing chess, I would create chaos on the board like I described. I would play in chess shops with people blowing smoke and music. I’d play chess with loud Gyuto monk chants bursting into my head from speakers.

[…]

I was creating chaos everywhere to train at being at peace in chaos. That was kind of part of my way of life and I found it to be a huge advantage that I had competitively.

Flow is nice for plenty of reasons. But a mistake is thinking you can only get good work done when in a flow state.

As the book suggests, it’s time for me to hit publish and put myself on the hook.