Hey, this is Scott of Photography Banzai.
Today I'm going to talk a little bit about trying
to be effective with your time. Now, I'm actually
doing some today. Getting my car worked on. Brought some equipment.
I didn't bring a lot of stuff. I just have the action camera
and extra microphone. I'm going to go over a few things that I feel work
decently well, at least in my case with being productive. One is avoid
certain things that can pull that time away. Now, in my case
I watch a lot of youtube videos which
is good and bad. Kind of difficult because you watch the next and the next
one... which is kind of their thing. And kind of the benefit and the negative
together. Also, I've been avoiding video games for a long time. But I did pick up
the Master Chief Collection on the PC, which
I mean I've waited for that for a really long time.
So it was definitely something I wanted to eventually pick up.
And I played through the stuff that's available. So it's actually good that,
in that case, they're releasing the games one after the other. And there's like a
time gap so it's good that I can't keep spending time on it.
And I don't want to replay it, at least at the moment. Games definitely
are a big time sink for a lot of people. But I have been pretty good at avoiding
it. Another thing is I try to switch off between what
I'm doing because sometimes you're really not into doing a
specific thing. In my case maybe video editing...
Or going out into 100 degree weather, Fahrenheit.
So I switch off. One day i'll be writing the notes for a video.
Or the information that i'll put in a video.
And then i'll actually go and film it another day, or
maybe i'll do the editing over one two three days...
And then give it a break for editing. And I've also found switching off to
something completely different, but it's still productive if it's kind of in the
same realm. In my case I've written a few
photography books. A convention one. One on Arizona, I've
been out there for a few times. Have some family and I do
photography usually when I'm out there. Also, I'm writing something,
basically the general outline, and I've started filling in
some of the actual text. That's a nice thing to switch off to. Because it is
something completely different. And I should
actually get into more computer stuff. More software
programming, which I haven't done in quite a while. Which is not good.
But my degree is in Computer Science. One thing I did mention in a poll is that
i was thinking about doing build guides for PCs, Windows PCs.
So all the components. What I think would work well given a certain
cost. For creative work, specifically. So I'm talking photos and videos. Mostly
videos because that takes a lot more of the computer
usually than the photo side. I'll probably do that, of course I don't
have the budget to actually build those things. But we'll
see how it works out. A good thing to do is mix exercise with
doing any type of work. Or whatever you consider work.
Because it does help get your mind clear. It gets the blood flowing. It just
generally gives you a better state of mind. At least
in my experience. When you get some type of exercise so
when I do the videos going out and taking photos, that's kind of a combined
benefit. One, I'm able to make some type of video out of it usually.
Two, I'm able to get the exercise. Three, trying to enjoy photography.
Which is another benefit of course. And the video stuff...
It is definitely a combined benefit. A lot of the things that I do lately
are related to making videos. It helps with motivation to have a purpose. So in
the case of... my purpose is trying to make this
channel something special and useful to people.
Entertaining... and with that comes the motivation to go
out and do stuff. Photography specifically a lot of the
time, but talking like this or video related
things. In the general genre that I decided for
that specific channel. I do have some other channels that I
don't put much time into. Back when the YouTube partner program
changed where you need a thousand subscribers and four thousand watch
hours per year to be in the program, I had one
channel that was doing decently well. Like twenty dollars
a month adsense revenue. But that got cut off. It's hard to
justify the time when I should be putting it into this one
instead. One challenge I found with making videos, especially with popularity.
Is that I do want things to be popular. I do want things to be viewed.
A lot of people, of course, are interested in the technology.
And the gear things, like that. And when you don't have a huge audience
it's harder to access things. Because: One, the budget isn't there.
Two, companies don't care as much.
But there is a lot to it, just trying to
find that motivation. It is difficult definitely. And all the positive comments
help a lot. The negative ones definitely don't help.
One thing I noticed with Youtube and how they changed their internal admin thing...
Is that it shows comments you haven't responded to.
In my case I respond a lot so a lot of the negative comments ones I don't
respond to. And then they stay in that comment admin
area. And I see them over and over and over
again. And it gets pretty taxing to see those. Because generally I don't like
deleting comments unless they're super crazy.. extreme, like attacking me type of
thing. So if they're just relatively negative I
tend to leave them. One thing I do also have on with the
admin stuff is that any links go into a holding area.
So links are never automatically displayed in my comments.
There's so many people trying to post amazon affiliate links,
things like that. And it's just super impolite.
One thing I need to actually do less of is look at the stats
for videos. Because it doesn't change a lot. I can tell that
YouTube has some type of caching mechanism
with their admin stuff. The only thing that really updates a lot
is the... this one specific amount of views per two days
metric. Besides that a lot of the stats don't change
for hours at a time, as far as I can tell. And I spend way too much time looking at
that even though it doesn't change. It's just a
thing I need to convert my brain to,is to not do it as much. Because it's just a
waste of time. Before the virus outbreak thing I was
eating out a lot. Almost once a day, which isn't great of course.
And it was expensive. I could be more effective because i make
something simple. And I'll probably try to integrate that more
into what I do. At least if things go back to
easily being able to go to restaurants and not having to worry.
The reverse is that when I went out to restaurants a lot it's the
being outside. Walking around, things like that where
there is an added benefit to going out to eat. And if you do
stay home and make your food you're kind of
only doing one thing instead of doing two at the same time.
So that is a slight negative to me. I do like trying to do multiple things at
once when I can. Just a quick talk about this DJI Osmo
Action. It is pretty nice, but there are some caveats that I've noticed.
Even if you're using a large SD card that is formatted in the
exFAT format, I've noticed that the splits with the DJI Osmo Action,
the audio is off. Because I have a full audio recording externally
and I notice even when the clips are butted together perfectly...
There's an audio sync issue between the four
gigabyte pieces. So that's a hassle that i'm dealing with.
Especially now because I'm using the external recorder
to have the extra benefit of decent higher quality audio.
Now, the Osmo is not bad actually I think I can
in general get a good audio recording out of it, but
it doesn't isolate as well as something like
this. And the stabilization is very nice. So that I can integrate more clips that have
motion, have action to them. Where the cheap
junk action cameras that I've bought in the past, they work decently well on a
tripod, not moving at all. They're just not good
for that. In this case with the stabilization as it is which it's
all digital but it's high quality digital.. It works well
enough that I can integrate stuff. There are drawbacks, but the size is a
nice benefit. If you can be bothered to use ND filters,
variable nd filters, with your full camera and a larger
aperture lens outdoors. You'll get that nice blurred background, but
it is a benefit to actually be able to see and recognize what's happening back
there. Especially with creative work it is
challenging to get out there and do it. One little thing
at a time does help. And piecing it up into groups or
little bits of work definitely helps as well.
Like yesterday I edited a video non-stop. But I found that little piece of
motivation. I rode with it and it helped a lot to get that video
edited and published. Anyways, hope you enjoyed
this talk. Something different and simple.
I'm Scott of Photography Banzai.