TJL #56: Batch your tasks (Daily productivity #31)

Productivity tips that work for me and might work for you

Jan 19, 2021

Daily productivity #31

Today’s tip: Batch your tasks.

Today I actually applied one of my own productivity tips: Separate your writing from editing (Daily productivity #13).

Well, instead of writing I was cutting and instead of editing I was deleting. The idea here is that you want to minimise switching costs. Switching between tasks is costly so try to batch your tasks together.

Before batching

My workflow for editing a YouTube video is very simple, I just have to remove the silent parts where I don’t say anything. This is rather straightforward if you have identified a region you want to cut

Move to start of region and cut (cmd-k)
Move to end of region and cut clip (cmd-k)
Select clip (move mouse and click)
Ripple delete (x)

My workflow was something like this:

Move to start and cut clip (cmd-k)
Move to end and cut clip (cmd-k)
Select clip (click)
Ripple delete (x)
Move to start and cut clip (cmd-k)
Move to end and cut clip (cmd-k)
Select clip (click)
Ripple delete (x)
etc…

Then it hit me. Could I possibly apply my productivity tip here?

After batching

Would it be better if I were to batch the cutting together and batch the deleting together?

The idea here is to first go through the footage once to identify all cut points and make a snip at each point. Then another second time to just delete every empty sequence without sound.

My new workflow looked like this. First, going through the whole clip once

Cut start point
Cut end point
Cut start point
Cut end point
…

And then again a second time:

ripple delete
ripple delete
…

You guessed it, this was way more efficient.

Batch your tasks

The main benefit I experienced was that I was working with the footage instead of against the footage. Before, I was jumping forward to identify the cut points and jumping backwards to delete them. In my new workflow I pass through the footage forwards twice. Another benefit was that I really got into the zone. I’m not sure whether it’s actually faster, but it feels faster, and that’s a nice experience.

Batch your tasks: Separate your writing and editing and your cutting and deleting.

Thank you for reading!

That was today’s issue of the Daily productivity Newsletter 🚀

Daily Productivity is a newsletter in which I share practical and effective tips on how to become more productive.

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As always, you can find me on my website janmeppe.com or on Twitter at @janmeppe.

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