Episode Highlights

• Zack’s morning routine and how it increases his productivity, then we segue into Maxim’s morning routine which is very different but equally effective
• Why a morning routine isn’t a set thing and can be tailored to when you have the most creative energy during the day (i.e. budgeting your energy)
• How making decisions requires energy and that energy is a finite resource, so you have to build up your capacity for mental focus over time
• How incorporating meditation into your day can drastically increase your productivity
• The importance of slowing down and how it can actually increase your productivity drastically (and how this technique can even include cat videos on YouTube!)
• Hacking all-nighters with exercise instead of caffeine and stimulants
• Why you shouldn’t be ashamed of that afternoon nap (and why NASA agrees)
• How to structure your day around focused periods of work and breaks ((i.e. The ‘Pomodoro’ techique) rather than just droning on all day long trying to get stuff done
• How the brain absolutely cannot multitask and how micro distractions can drastically derail your efficiency
• How stress is a biological barrier to memory creation and even creative thought
• Why focusing on stress management is the ultimate productivity hack
• Why naming your bins and organizing your media is ESSENTIAL to being a fast and productive editor (and why)
• Using Evernote and OmniFocus to prioritize your goals and your day
• How to maximize naming your sequences and versioning
• The myth of ‘Picture Lock’
• How your ability to access material very quickly can make or break whether or not you get hired on the next job
• Learning to hone your first instincts

Useful Links

• A Classic Case of Post-Production Burnout
• Headspace meditation app
• Study showing 52 minutes on 17 minutes off is the optimal pomodoro
• The Nutreínce mutlivitamin powder I put in my water in the morning
• Bulletproof Coffee Kit

Transcript

Zack Arnold: So I’m here today with Maxim Jago, and the cool thing about talking to Maxim today is that if you say, “Hey, this is the guy that wrote the book on Adobe Premiere,” guess what? This is the guy that wrote the book on Adobe Premiere. So, Maxim, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it.

Maxim Jago: Hello, it’s an absolute pleasure.

Zack Arnold: So I feel like I could probably segment this into about seven one-hour shows where we could talk about you as a filmmaker. We could talk about you as an Adobe certified trainer and author. We could talk about Tai Chi and Qi Gong. I mean, there are so many things that you and I could geek out on, and we’ve done that in the past. We’ve met a couple of times at different Adobe events and editing events, editors retreats, stuff like that, and we just-it’s so easy to get sucked into a great conversation. And I just said, “What if we just recorded one of these awesome conversations? And what I really want to focus on today, which I know is something that you’re kind of a geek on as well, is I’m a huge productivity geek, and I really want to focus today on how we can number one look specifically how to use an NLE. Not just I don’t want to talk about buttons, like use these buttons and menus, but I want to talk conceptually about how can I look at my NLE, whether it’s Abbott or Final Cut or Adobe. We’re not going to be platform specific, but how you can be really efficient and approach things. But then on the other side of it, just general ideas for how to make your day more productive, how to organize it. I know that you’re into a lot of the the same tips and tricks that I am as far as making my day more efficient and productive. So I just kind of want to geek out.

Maxim Jago: Well, great. He has a ton of stuff to talk about. How do you how do you start your day? How do you how do you kick off the day?

Zack Arnold: Yeah. So I’m I’ve been spending a long time developing a very specific morning and evening ritual because I found that with all the research that I’ve done in personal development, when you look at people that are really high performers and really want to go to that next level and achieve things, it is across the board unanimous that they have morning routines, and that’s something that I really never had before. I was never a morning person. I grew up on a farm, and not being a morning person when you grow up on a farm is just the worst hell on earth because your dad’s sitting there knocking on your door at five in the morning, saying, “Okay, time to wake up and feed the sheep and the cows, and you’re like, “Oh my god, I just want four more hours of sleep. So I’ve never been a morning person, never had a routine, but I said, “You know what? I really need to figure this out. So one of the things that I read and learned from Tim Ferriss is that you need to automate the first two hours of your day, so you don’t have to make a single decision. So you’re not going to work by nine or 10 a.m. already exhausted from having to make all these decisions. So basically, I wake up now, probably neighborhood around 6o’clock 6/31 thing I do is I will wake up after, of course, I do the same thing that everybody else does. I will wake up and I will get 12 ounces of water, and I will have a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, and I will also pour a packet of this multivitamin powder called nutrients. It’s my favorite thing on the planet. I’ll put a link in the show notes to all this stuff, but I just sit and drink that. I don’t have my phone in front of me. I haven’t checked by email. I’m not checking Facebook or Twitter. I’m just sitting in silence, drinking that 12 ounces of water for like 10 minutes. Then I’ll usually do between 15 and 30 minutes of either some type of yoga or meditation or stretching, just something simple, just to open up the body. And then by that time, usually my kids are up, so then it’s just making breakfast for them and making either I’ll have bulletproof coffee in the morning a couple days a week, or I do really nutrient dense vegetable smoothie with a lot of vegetable protein and protein seeds like hemp seeds, chia seeds, stuff like that. And then I’ll take I always take a cold shower in the morning because that really invigorates me, wakes me up. Something I also do now at night, about 510 minutes before bed, because it’ll lower my core body temperature. But then once I take the shower and get dressed, then it’s off to the races, and my day is my day, and who knows what’s going to happen. But I already just feel so centered that I kind of feel like when things start to fall apart during the day, whether it’s work issue or whatever it is, I just I feel more centered. Whereas six months to a year ago, I would wake up and it was just chaos. I was like, “Oh my god, my daughter’s awake! and “Oh, I’ve got to make the coffee, and “Oh my god, I’ve got 10 emails. Oh crap, I have to respond to these emails before I got get out the door. And that was a force multiplier that destroyed my entire day. You know, so that that’s kind of the way that I’ve structured my morning now, and it’s completely changed my life. Just having a morning routine-that’s

Maxim Jago: Very cool. I wish I had your knowledge of nutrition in my brain. You know, in the Matrix where he just downloads kung fu. Right. I always thought that that was awesome. They actually talked about that idea. They called them biochips many years ago, and probably. But I’m going to go with. It’s going to be a long time, but we will eventually just be able to write memories. I’m going to go with 100 years. It’s a long way off because it’s very complex creating complex memories. But I don’t have that knowledge. I do have some basic rudimentary knowledge. It’s interesting, though, some of the stuff you say there. I think that you know, from studying Tai Chi for a long time, essentially Tai Chi is a martial art. For many people, it’s a lifestyle, but it really is essentially originally a martial art and and some exercises to prepare for the martial art. But if you were to sum up Tai Chi in a word, it would actually be stillness. If you want to be amazing at Tai Chi, you need to learn how to be still, and that stillness gives you a sense of your boundaries, what’s inside of you? What’s outside of you? Where you are? It allows you to be centered. I think is one of the words you used. And being centered allows you to define your relationship with your world and with yourself to have a sense that this is me, this is not me. You know, Tai Chi as a martial art is just stillness and breath, really. If you get those two things right, you can be kick-ass, but it’s surprisingly difficult to get those two things right. But I think that in the morning, for me, I end up tuning in. Actually, it takes me a long time to go from being unconscious to being conscious. I’m not a morning person either, and the problem for me is that I have so many jobs. I have so many different things that I do. I’ll get to the evening. It’ll be midnight. I’ll be thinking, okay, this is good. I’m sleepy. I should, you know, I should go to sleep. And then I’ll think, oh, whoa, wait a minute. No, there’s that that thing that I really, really want to get done today. And then I’ll do that thing. And then you know, another hour goes by, and another hour. And lately, it’s been terrible because I’ve been traveling a lot internationally, so I don’t really have a time zone anymore, and I think that you know they say that it doesn’t matter if you work nights or if you work days as long as you have a routine for your sleep. If you don’t have a routine, it can be very disruptive. So lately, I tend to just try to let myself sleep when I’m tired and be awake when I’m awake, and it works out pretty well. But I’m slow to wake up in the morning. I go through this phase where I wonder who I am, what year it is, what I am, am I human? Which, what what is this thing? Oh, it’s it’s gravity, okay. And I gradually go through this process of discovering that I’m human and that I’m alive, and then my my consciousness gradually comes to. But for me, I I like to give myself. I’d say the first hour, and for me, the first hour is I do check through my emails, but I don’t deal with any of them. So I throw away the rubbish, and I flag up the emails that I need that I will deal with that day. And I have this. Actually, I have a set of tabs that I open up in my browser, and I just deal with all of them, and the tabs are very simple. I go to Facebook, I go to Twitter, I go to arstechnica.com which is just a good hardcore technology website. It’s nicely presented. I go to macrumors.com because I’m hoping Apple’s going to come out with a MacBook Pro that has 32 gig of memory, and I want a new iPhone, and I’m and I’m just waiting for a phone that doesn’t die all the time. The battery life. I go to news.

Maxim Jago: Google News is a good collator of information, and I often go to Science.com and I just kind of skim through everything, make sure I’m up to date on everything while I have a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, and I will often do stretching or Tai Chi, but for me, you know, having practiced Tai Chi for a long time, I really just try to seek that I have that center, and then it takes me about an hour, and after an hour, I feel my energy rise, and I’ll have something very light for a breakfast. Actually, I very often have a couple of cookies for breakfast. That’s probably really terrible, isn’t it? But it’s just the perfect for me. It’s the perfect thing: little bit of sugar, something to chew on, cup of coffee, and then I’m awake and I’m ready for my day. I can jump up and get to it right away, but I’m just not really fully conscious. You know, it takes a long time.

Zack Arnold: Right, and I think that it’s it’s interesting that you’ve kind of found your own way to shape this around knowing that you’re just not a morning person, and I think that’s really important because in all of the research that I’ve done about how to become more productive and get the most out of your day, everybody almost unanimously will say, “Well, you have to establish a morning routine, and you have to do your most important task of the day before you do anything else. You can’t check email, you can’t check any social media. Don’t read the news. You have to shut the world out for two or three hours, and you just need to do the most important task of the day. It’s something that has been called eating your frog, right? It’s it’s a concept that comes from Mark Twain, and I have a past episode that I did two episodes actually with productivity expert Zack Sexton from Agent Efficiency, and we talk all about this, so I won’t go into it too deep. But what I like about what you’re saying is that you are accepting the fact that you’re not a morning person. So for you to sit down and focus and do your most important task of the day during that first hour, you’d be doing the worst quality work that you’d be capable of because you’re just not there. You know, maybe there are different ways that all of a sudden you could start to reshape the routine and change it and like become a morning person. But if this works for you, you’re just budgeting your time, saying, “Well, during the first hour, I’m useless. I’m just not going to do good work. So that’s when I check Facebook and Twitter and MacWorld, and that’s when I’m just going to kind of do the stuff where my brain doesn’t need to be firing and. Then you, I’m, I’m sure that you start finding the time where you block things out, and you say, “I’m in focus mode, and like you’re, you’re just budgeting your time accordingly based on your energy, which is a huge productivity trick.

Maxim Jago: Well, also, I think that you know, I think that there are different kinds of thinking process. You know, we tend to, we tend to think of thinking as just thinkingness, and it’s not. There’s different types of focus. I’ve discovered that I’d like it not to be this. I’d like it to be better. But the truth is that when I’m really focused and really on the case, doing some work, I feel like my my mind is like a laser beam. I’m just absolutely straight on the task, and I get things done with great productivity. But the truth is, I probably have a total of about three hours a day of that. That’s probably all I’ve really got, and and then maybe I’ve got maybe another eight hours that day of I can generally get things done. Like you know, you can go to the post office, you can deal with stuff, you can put a check in the bank, that kind of thing. But for really focused, dedicated, productive time, thinking time, decision making time. I probably have about three hours, and you know, then there’s some other hours where I’m just kind of heard. You know, I don’t own a TV. I haven’t got time to watch TV. But I think that the idea of having a ritual in the morning, which is great, I’m I’m a little bit envious, but the idea of having that maybe works a little bit more easily if you have a more linear working activity. You know, you get up, you have a job, you go home, you finish the job. I have about 15 jobs, and in many of the clients I’m working with, they’re in different time zones and they’re all around the world, and and it’s hard for me to juggle all of those things in in a simple, clear process. I remember reading about a composer, a classical music composer, who had this beautiful ritual. You just don’t talk to them. They’re getting on with their work, and they would do their work for a certain number of hours in the day. They would hope the muse would come, and they would produce stuff, and then they’re done, and they would stop. And it sounds idyllic, but I don’t just have one job. I have lots of different things, and there are lots of things where I’m spinning plates. You know, a little bit of progress with this thing, and then I’m waiting for a client review on another thing, and it goes around. You get emails about stuff, and some of them matter a lot, and some don’t. But I think that you mentioned earlier about being the challenge of making decisions, and I know from directing films that by the end of a day of directing, which is essentially just the business of making decisions, you know, and being being a director is deciding things constantly. And you reach the end of the day, and someone could say to you, “Do you want a coffee? And you just, I don’t know, I’ve used up my decision-making juice today. Why don’t you get a coffee and let’s see if I discover I want it? I got nothing left, and so I do think that we we forget to think of thinking and the mind like a muscle, and it is. It gets fatigued, and it needs to be developed over time. One of the things I found from practicing meditation is that you know you sit down thinking, “Great, I’ll just think about nothing for a while, and you discover you can’t, and you have to build up your capacity for mental focus over time in the same way that you’d build up to running a marathon.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, it’s. I’m actually glad that you brought that up because one of the routines that I have started more religiously is meditation, and that’s part of an evening routine for me. I studied meditation and qigong for years when I was growing up as a martial artist in both high school and college, but it’s something that just started to fall away, especially as I got really busy in my career and then had kids, and then I actually wrote a recent blog post, and I’ll put a link to this as well about my most recent case of post production burnout, as I called it, where I completely crashed from being overworked. And the first thing I came back to was meditation. I didn’t start to reshape my diet again or say I need to jump back into P90X. It was just I just need to get a meditation practice. And I don’t know if you’re aware of this app or not. It’s called Headspace. Headspace is amazing. I’d heard it a couple of times here and there, and I thought, oh yeah, well there’s there’s 100 different apps on meditation, and everybody has their own meditation app, and I didn’t really give it much thought. But then I heard a podcast that Rich Roll did. He’s a he’s one of the top health and fitness podcasters. It’s an ultra endurance athlete, and he did a podcast with the creator of it, and I was just astounded at this guy’s story. And I said, “All right, I have to give this thing a try. It doesn’t sound like it’s just another one of those kitschy $1 apps. I have to try it, and it is brilliant. It is amazing, and it’s something that I now do every single day. And it’s made by a guy that’s a Tibetan Buddhist monk, but he’s he’s British. Yeah, literally, he sounds almost exactly like you. It’s almost creepy. I feel like every night when I do my evening meditation, I’m there with Maxim. But what he’s done is he’s just created this system where if you’ve never done meditation ever, you just sit and he does a guided meditation with you. But he says exactly what you did, which is that meditation isn’t sitting there and saying, “Okay, think about nothing. Okay, think about nothing. Think about nothing. Like he really takes you through the way the mind works and the thought process, and really helps you clear the cobwebs and become accepting of the fact that your mind races. And one of the cool things is that near the end of every session, he’ll say, “All right, now just think about whatever you want. Just let your mind go. And he says that overwhelmingly, everybody says. That’s the time I finally stop thinking because I stopped trying. So it’s like you said, they’re just the mind is a muscle, and you have to look at it no different than if I want to lose 10 pounds, or I want to get a six pack of abs, or I want bigger biceps. I have to consistently work at it, and the mind is really, really no different whatsoever.

Maxim Jago: That’s a great tip. I’ve just installed it. That’s awesome. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: It’s it’s fantastic, and you you can get the first 10 sessions for free, and then after that, it’s it’s like a Netflix subscription. It’s like 10 bucks a month or something.

Maxim Jago: Touching on what you’re what you’re describing there, there’s a beautiful quote, and the quote is a gentleman will walk but never run, and I love that idea. When I remember when I was taking my driving test, and you know early on I wasn’t quite sure what to do, and I wasn’t sure how to how to navigate the signs. And my driving instructor said, “Just stop, stop in the middle of the road. And I said, “But you you can’t do that. There’s cars behind me. They want to get where they’re going. And the driving instructor said, “Well, if they hit you, it’s their fault. You know, if they drive into the back of you, it’s because they were too close, and it’s it’s never your fault if someone drives into you. And the primary concern is safety. You have to give yourself time and space to think. And if it inconveniences some people, then so be it. And I found that when I most feel flustered and the most overwhelmed by things to do, you know, you get that classic thing where you’re thinking, “Oh, I better run out the door. I’ve got to go. I’m really late. I’ve got to get going. Very, very often, that is when I will absolutely stop, and I will just completely reclaim control of the moment and look around the room and think, you know, have I forgotten anything? Because what happens is that you rush out the door, and then you realize later you didn’t bring that one thing that you really, really need. And my girlfriend told me a beautiful story just yesterday about how a friend of hers had left a has asthma and he’d left his asthma reliever at her house. So she drove to her house to get the asthma reliever for him, and then drove back. But she’d forgotten to bring the asthma inhaler, so she had to drive all the way back again because she just was in such a hurry, she forgot to get the thing that she’d gone there to get. So she’s going to beat me up for mentioning that story. But it’s important to stop. It’s important to slow down, especially when you’re in a hurry, because you’re going to make so many more mistakes, and you’re going to end up far less productive. And the same is true, you know. Actually, in the way you learn Tai Chi, is you move very, very slowly. Not because you’re going to move slowly in combat, but because it gives you a very deep sense of what is the right movement and what is the wrong movement, unfettered by dashing and racing and dealing with a person who’s trying to punch you in the face. You just make sure that your body knows exactly the right way to move, and I think with with productivity, we have this false idea that rushing is necessarily going to be faster. Going quickly, having haste, making progress is good, but I think it’s important to take breaks. You know, the mind has your brain’s got about four and a half minutes of serious full time concentration, and after about four and a half minutes, you’ve got about let’s say it depends on the person 20 to 40 minutes of 50% attention, and after that, it’s a kind of a no man’s land. Now that means that in terms of productivity, probably the most productivity is going to come from little and often, and by that I mean small amounts of really intensive work, and then a brain break. And if I’m working very intensively right now, I’m working on a oh my goodness, it’s like 180 new videos using post production software, and it just feels like a wall of never endingness. I will as soon as I begin to feel that brain fatigue, I’ll just change subject. I’ve actually in the past, literally Googled cat video. Just show me something that is silly and pointless and engaging, and give my brain a chance to recuperate because it it needs that time. You know, there’s a there’s a buffer. They reckon the hippocampus is involved with distributing memories, and it has a buffer. And when the buffer’s full, you’re just not really there anymore. You’re not really participating. You experience most of reality via memory.

Maxim Jago: And if the memory is full, or the short-term working memory is full, it’s like the RAM on your computer runs out. You just can’t function. But you think you can, so you keep chugging on, chugging on, and it’s like waiting for that spinning ball to finish on your computer screen while your brain does things. If you take a little break, best of all, if you’ve got to work late, my top tip for late nights, where you’re, you know, you really have to pull an all-nighter to finish a thing, your brain, your body goes through different stages. Your body temperature starts to drop. You’re ready to become unconscious. If you have caffeine, you it makes you jumpy. It doesn’t actually necessarily make you more cognizant. And what does make you more cognizant is cardiovascular activity. So I would, for example, do press ups and sit ups, and a little bit of exercise will give you another half hour of really focused attention.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, that’s a fantastic. That I’ve used, and I’ve I’ve kind of made it a point to just not do all nighters or do even late nights anymore, unless there’s absolutely no other question that this is just the only way to do it. But that’s why I have a kettlebell sitting next to my desk. Is like I remember I was doing it wasn’t an all nighter. I can’t remember the last time I actually didn’t go a night without any kind of sleep whatsoever, but I was doing the season one finale of Empire, and we were just there were like two weeks of just absolute hell getting that thing ready for broadcast, and I think we delivered it like the day before air or something. But I just remember every hour or so, I just had a little alarm on my phone. I was just like, “All right, I’m just going to do 10 kettlebell swings. Did them, went right back to work, and then another hour, 10 kettlebell swings, or whatever it was, and you don’t really have the energy for it. But what you find is it’s just like this little burst, and it’s way better than caffeine. Like the only time I will have caffeine is right in the morning, but I make sure that I’m doing it in the bulletproof format, so I’m having the fat along with it. So it’s a much much slower drip into my bloodstream. So rather than getting that jolt and feeling totally jacked up for two hours and then crashing, I have this really really slow drip of caffeine until about 4o’clock in the afternoon, and I never feel ramped up. I just feel focused and ready to go, but I never crash. But the biggest thing that I do in the afternoon, if I start to feel my energy waning, is I’ll just start doing some type of really really simple exercise, and that to me is way way better than just using Red Bull or coffee or whatever it is that you might use to try and get perked up in the afternoon.

Maxim Jago: Oh yeah, it’s awful, and you know, let’s not forget to sing the praises of having a nap, a nap in the afternoon, a short nap. I think NASA said the ideal nap duration is 26 minutes. That’s just great. You know, you wake up feeling kind of groggy for a few minutes, but then you’ve you’ve got massively more focus for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. And the other problem is, you know, very often I remember years ago my my solution actually my my break would be a cup of coffee and a Kit Kat. By the way, Kit Kats-you know-it’s a chocolate bar. It’s much nicer in the UK than in America. It’s a completely different thing. You know, it’s great. You get a little hit of sugar and the caffeine. But the problem with eating a sugary snack, of course, is that you get this big insulin hit after the sugar rush. So you have this brief period where the caffeine kicks in and the sugar’s there, and you’re really focused, and then you’re extra super tired afterwards because of the downside of those two things. Those are not effective ways of staying focused and staying productive. I sound like I feel like as I’m speaking, I’m sounding like an old fogey saying, you know, you should just slow down and do less, and and but it’s the opposite. It’s about working intensively for short periods of time, and then acknowledging that you’re human. You’re not a robot. You will need to take pauses, but those pauses. You know, I wrote a book about teaching and learning, and what I found, I created a teaching system. I call it the ESP teaching system because it’s broadly about empathy skills, storytelling, and patterns, which are key components of cognition for us as a species, and learning and understanding, and so on, and communication. But one of the things I found in that in that process is that is that the brain is finite. You know, it just you’re human, and it will take you. There’s a limit to how much you can do in a single stint. It isn’t going to keep going and going and going. And for example, when you’re speaking, most listeners will miss one sentence in five. They just won’t take it in. And usually, it’s because you say something interesting, and they go to it. They go into a micro daydream, and you know it’s a micro daydream where you’ll say something that just reminds them of a conversation they had yesterday, and just for a moment, they’re thinking about that conversation yesterday, and they miss the first half of the next sentence, which means that they don’t know what the sentence is about. And that’s why, when you’re communicating, you need to communicate everything twice. And in fact, I like you know in teaching and learning, I like the buddy system. I like the when two people are sharing a machine, for example, to learn how to edit. It’s good when two people are sharing because one of the two will usually catch every sentence, if you know what I mean. So between the two of them, they can fill the blanks in for each other. And again, I suppose it comes back to what you were saying about acknowledging we’re human and that we we have limitations.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and one thing that I want to go back to that you’ve said a couple of times now that I really want to hit on, and I promise to anybody that’s listening, saying, “When do we get the NLE tips and tricks? And we’re I promise we’re going to get there. But frankly, this stuff is so much more important in the grand scheme of things. Like if you’re thinking, “Well, being productive means I have to know this keystroke and this keystroke, that’s like 1% of productivity. So in my opinion, this stuff is just way bigger picture. But I really want to drill down a little bit more into this idea of the the micro breaks and the time management, and I want to walk through a little bit how I have structured my day because I have found that I’m immensely more productive when I do these focus periods of work, and then I do these breaks that are just as focused, meaning that. I am detaching myself from all of my work, and you had said that there is this period of like four and a half minutes, then 20 minutes. And for those of you that I haven’t heard of this, there is something called the Pomodoro technique, and it has nothing to do with little tomatoes. That’s where the the word comes from. But the idea is that you take 25 minute session where you are completely intensely focused on a task, and you turn off your email, turn off Facebook, and it’s just this one thing. And then you take a five to 10 minute break where you just walk away, go to the bathroom, grab some water, chat with a friend, and then you come back and you do a 25 minute session again. And you continually do those throughout the day. And that was something developed in the 80s, and they’ve done extensive studies trying to find what is the magic number. And I’ll I don’t know the study offhand where it was from. I can research it and see if I can put a link in the show notes. And I apologize if it’s not in there. But the magic number, this part I do remember of the study. The magic number was 50-two on and 17 off. With it was a ton of people that they studied when they were the most productive. So I’ve been trying that, and it’s been amazing. Even though I’m at the office all day long, cutting dailies, doing notes, whatever it is, I only do five focused time block sessions a day. Which means that I’m actually only editing and cutting for 250 minutes in a day, which is like three or four hours. Like you said, you’re really only focused and productive for about three hours a day. It’s the same thing for me, and the rest of that, I’m grabbing water. I’m talking to people about this movie. I’m taking a walk around the block. Like I’m like a squirrel. Like I’m all over the place all day long. I will never be in my room for more than an hour at a time. But when I’m in my room during that 50 minutes, I have my email turned off. I have Facebook turned off. I have my phone either on airplane mode or do not disturb mode, and it’s me and Abbott, and that’s it. So I turn on the treadmill. I’ve got the dailies in front of me, and I cut. And I cannot even begin to explain how much more productive and how much faster I’m getting through my work. And I’m actually spending less time at the office, but I’m working less, so to speak, because a few years ago, when I didn’t have any of these tips and I was working on burn notice, I was putting in 14-hour days just to keep up with dailies because I was constantly being distracted and turning on Facebook and turning on Twitter and trying to keep up with this. And oh, I just got an email, so I should probably respond. They’re going to get mad if I don’t respond. And it’s just it’s that idea that what people don’t understand is that the brain is physically incapable of multitasking. It just it just can’t do it. And I know that’s something that you know a lot about.

Maxim Jago: Well, yeah, it just can’t. And you know, those little tiny minor distractions are much longer than it seems. You hear a noise and you look up. Takes 510 seconds for you to really get back into focusing on the task at hand. They found that open plan offices for that reason are up to 80% less efficient because there’s constantly some little distraction which you are evolutionarily designed to be distracted by because it could be a tiger in the undergrowth. So, you know, we are a nervous monkey. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, one of the things I was going to say about that teaching system I developed is I interviewed a neurologist about it, about how learning occurs and memories are created, and I developed an approach which was about four and a half minutes of very intense because learning is super hard, very energy intensive. Memory creation is is a challenge for the brain, which is why most of the brain’s activities relating to memory are involved with not remembering things. It’s it’s selectively discarding information, not keeping it. You know, I would do four and a half minutes of intense stuff, and then about a minute to a minute and a half, maybe two minutes of nonsense. You know, just anything that will distract the mind of the class, so that the brain non-consciously can get on with filing away the new information, and then I’ll come back to it and repeat. And I found that it massively improves recall, and it takes the pressure off. And the class doesn’t feel like they’re doing this intense marathon learning session. I think a lot of this comes back to that idea that you know you can walk, but you don’t have to run. You have to be realistic and and give yourself time. Those those breaks are fantastic, and you know that thing about switching off the phone, switching off Facebook is is just great, and it’s harder and harder in our ever connected society to feel like it’s okay to disconnect. You know, I think I’d be more worried about losing my phone than losing my wallet.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. It’s funny because my phone is my wallet. I keep all my cards like inside. Yeah, you’re really

Maxim Jago: In trouble. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Exactly.

Maxim Jago: So it’s yeah, it’s a problem. But I I think that I think that we forget to be kind to ourselves. We forget that we we think a lot about compassion towards others. We forget that we also need to have compassion for ourselves, and that means showing ourselves that we care about ourselves. I know this sounds a bit. We would say Ponsy in Britain. I don’t know what you would say here. Silly, but if you show yourself that you’re taking care of yourself, you will feel better, more alive, happier, more peaceful. And you know, stress, for example, is a biological barrier. To memory creation and to thinking itself. So, if you feel anxious, you will think less productively at a biological level because the the body begins to kick in with the fight or flight mechanism, which is all about focusing on motor neurons and not on higher brain function. It’s about reflexive responses. So, if you make sure that you feel calm and focused, you will tend to be more productive. Now, that’s not to say that stress is bad. There was an interesting TED talk. I’ve forgotten the name of the lady, and she was saying that she discovered that stress isn’t intrinsically bad for you. It uses more energy, so we tend to not be stressed all the time because in the wild we would not have had access to that much energy, but now of course we can just go and buy a milkshake or a chocolate bar. We’re full of energy. If we believe that stress is bad for us, another autonomic system in the body kicks in and begins to directly compete to counteract the symptoms of stress, and that’s what leads to the physiological consequences that are bad of stress. You get the hardened arteries and all that kind of thing. But they’ve discovered now that if you don’t believe stress is bad for you, if you just think it’s your body helping you to be focused and aware and present and ready, it actually doesn’t have a bad effect on you. It’s okay.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I think that’s a really really good point. Is that people just think that stress is a bad word and cortisol is a bad word, and the reason that we have so many chronic health problems throughout the world, but especially in the developed countries like the U.S. and the U.K. is chronic stress, right? But there’s a process that’s called hormesis, where your body actually does positive adaptations in the face of stress. And the perfect example of what hormesis is would be exercise. When you exercise, or you do a run, or you do high intensity interval training for 30 minutes, your body is saying, “What in the what are you doing to me? Right, like that’s a stress on your body, and there’s a response to that stress, but that response is helping you build stronger muscles and build more balance and core strength, and you know it’s it’s so your body is under stress, but that’s a good thing. But the problem is that when we’re in that fight or flight mode, we’re now in it 24 hours a day, rather than the tiger jumping out from behind the bush and us saying, “Oh my God, I got to run to survive. We’re saying, “Oh my God, my boss just sent me this email. Oh my God, my girlfriend just sent me this email. Oh my God, somebody needs this. And you are constantly under chronic stress, and your cortisol levels are jacked up. And one of the things that I really learned with my most recent bout of burnout, and again, I’ll put a link, and you can read all about it. But I had been spending so much time for the last 10 years just accumulating an endless amount of all of these tactics about what, how do I do this, how do I do that right? But what I didn’t realize, and I had heard this many, many times before, but I never internalized it until I learned the wrong way. Is that the number one productivity hack, or the number one life hack, is that you can’t just focus on I need to eat better or I need to exercise. It’s all based on your level of stress. So I just said, you know what? I’m just going to focus on stress management first before I worry about anything else, and then everything starts to kind of click into place. Because, like you said, you can’t learn as well or be as productive if you’re under stress. If you exercise, but you’re already crazy stressed out and anxious, you’re just hurting yourself. You’re actually not doing yourself any good whatsoever. If you’re under a tremendous amount of stress and your cortisol levels are jacked, you’re never going to be able to manage your eating hormones like ghrelin and leptin as far as your appetite hormones, your satiation hormones. You’re never going to be able to get those in balance because your cortisol levels are messing all of that up. So I just said I’m going to forget everything I’ve learned except how to manage stress, and I started doing that, and all of a sudden, the dominoes just all started to fall into the right place. I was like, ah, this makes sense. So it’s such an amazing productivity hack to figure out how to manage your stress levels, because if you’re totally stressed out and you’re saying, all right, well, what’s the best way to name my sequences, and how should I put my bins together and my NLE to be more efficient, you’re wasting your time because you’re not optimizing your system first. So that’s why I’m glad we spent so much time kind of going more into the meta side of all this. But now

Maxim Jago: It comes back to the extented, right? It comes back. Yes,

Zack Arnold: Absolutely.

Maxim Jago: This is me. This is what I’m doing. I’m present in this moment, doing whatever it is that I’m doing, there’s a there’s a great Zen philosopher Eckhart Tolle, and someone was saying, “What’s the purpose of life? He said, “Well, the purpose is whatever you’re doing right now is what you came here to do. So, if what you’re doing right now is drinking a cup of tea, then your purpose for being is to drink the cup of tea. If you’re walking down the street, your purpose is to walk down the street. If you’re editing a movie, your purpose is to edit the movie. You are here to do whatever you are doing. That’s you know I’m working on this slow metaphysics PhD. I’m probably going to be 80 by the time I finish it, but the conclusion is already there, which is to get on with it. If there is a reason why we’re. Here is to get on with what we’re doing, and we should worry less about whether it’s the right thing. There’s a time and a place for working out what we’re doing and whether this is the correct thing, and whether we should be, you know, should I be ingesting my media for this film or should I be taking a walk around the block? Okay, make a decision, but once you’ve made that decision, just be doing it and feel at peace with not knowing if you are necessarily always right. It’s okay to not know for sure. But moving on to to post again, I think that there are some simple things that I would always recommend to to stay productive that a lot of people seem to miss, and it’s just simple things like carefully naming and organizing your bins. I’m astonished at how often I see. You know, there’s a lot of TV stations, a lot of production companies, and I’m astonished by how often I just see a bunch of mess in the bins. Now I’m happy to cut on anything; doesn’t matter. But the all, but the bins are bins are bins. It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter what system you’re using. People don’t name stuff, and what that means is, you know, we were talking about these micro distractions where you you hear a noise in an office and and it distracts you, and it takes a long time for your brain to fully focus on the task at hand again, and it dramatically decreases productivity. I tend to work in silence. I sometimes have music on when I’m working, but usually I work in silence. And you know, if you don’t do things like organize your media or name your bins, if you just jump in and go for it, what that means is that pretty much every time you look in the bin, every time you look at your media, your brain has to do an extra layer of thinking about where is that thing, and I’m a great believer in doing work for the future self, the future version of you. You know, another little silly life hack that knowing that I’m not great in the morning. If I know I have to get up super early and get to it, I will usually lay out my clothes the night before, and I do that because I know that I’m awake the night before, and I won’t be awake in the morning, so if I’ve already picked out what I’m going to wear and just laid it down somewhere for me to put on in the morning, I know that as long as I put those clothes on, I am ready to go. I don’t have to pay attention at that time. Now, as you’re cutting, you’re going to go through different phases, and one of the phases that’s important is that in the zone, creative, aware, focused state of mind, where you you’re just dealing with the storytelling, you’re dealing with the narrative. Doesn’t matter if you’re working on a doc or whatever.

Maxim Jago: And what you don’t want to be doing in that state of mind is remembering whether you transcoded that media to the right resolution or not. And is that the one in this bin, or is it the one? Is it the untitled bin 17 or untitled bin 18 that you want to look in. So if you just take seconds, moments to name and organize things carefully, it actually dramatically impacts your performance further down the edit.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and seriously, like you and I, I could do 10 hours. We could do 10 part sessions on this. Like this is, I could geek out for days on this. I’m so excited that you brought this up because I am a stickler about organization, and you can talk to my assistant Natalie, and it’s it’s hard for me to call her my assistant because she’s so much more than just an assistant. Like I literally could not function in this world without everything that she does. But technically, she’s my assistant editor on Empire, and she’s also kind of my my my right hand, so to speak, with Fitness and Post. But she knows very well that until everything is exactly where it needs to be, where I have automated the entire project, so I know where everything is without thinking, I won’t start dailies. So a lot of people will think, “Oh my God, I just got my first day of dailies on the show, and I got to jump in because I only have eight days, and I got to deliver. If my choice were to just jump in and not be totally organized, or if I just took my entire first day on a new episode and I didn’t touch dailies, but all I did was organize things so I could find it to the point where I have automated my thought process, I know that scientifically that I’m going to get done faster because I know where everything is. So I will literally go to her and I will say, you know what, my strategy with Avid specifically, it’s really the same with Final Cut Adobe, whatever. But as you know, the the way that Avid thinks with bins versus bins and other projects or other NLEs is a little bit differently. But what I will do is make sure that I don’t have to think about is this the fifth folder down from the top? Is this the seventh folder down from the top? I literally, almost with my eyes closed, if if the the surface were tactile, and I can use my fingers. I could find stuff without having to have my eyes open, but obviously, because you know you can’t do that with a mouse, you have to be able to see it. But I will say to her, you know what? Every time I look for my music bin with score, my eye is going here. But we actually have it four folders up. You need to change this, so this folder is now four folders down. So I just automatically go there with my eye, open it up, click, and then I start making the decisions that I need to make that are using up the energy in my brain and burning calories. But if there’s anything that I’m doing over and over and over throughout the day that feels inefficient, I will change it, and I will spend the time to do it right until it works. And now I’ve gotten to the point. Where the only decisions I’m making are: is this a good cut? Is this a good cut? Is this the right take? But I’m never making the decision. Ooh, am I looking in this bin for this, or is it in this bin? Like completely, totally automated. And it’s like you said, the thing with the close. That’s the perfect example of how you don’t have to waste the energy in the morning making a decision because making a decision scientifically, they’ve proven this requires burning a certain amount of calories. That’s because the energy is used. Your brain doesn’t want to do it, and that’s the reason that people like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg they wear the same thing all the time, right? Like everybody knew Steve Jobs; he had his jeans and his black turtleneck. It’s because he has so many decisions to make that can impact his life and the life of obviously now billions of people, that having to stand there in front of his closet for two minutes and say, “What am I going to wear today? That is costing him 1000s of dollars a second. So he doesn’t make those decisions. I

Maxim Jago: Do a little bit of that, and Einstein did that as well. He apparently had eight sets of clothes, and he would just-they were always all the same. And he would just put another one on each day, and his housekeeper would wash them in in cycles. I try to keep that kind of stuff as simple as possible, just because I’ve I have too much stuff to think about. I’m not necessarily saying that what I’m thinking about is particularly important, but I you choose what you focus your energy on. I mean, there’s another example of that in in terms of productivity. Is that there’s a tip I picked up from a book years ago? The the things that induce stress are the things that have to be done today that you haven’t gotten to yet. So I I actually I use Evernote. My life is in Evernote. If that company goes bust, I’m in trouble.

Zack Arnold: You and me both. We’re out of business, buddy,

Maxim Jago: And you know, but it’s so I’m living in that app, and the I I just have one note for each day. I used to call it day, so today it says it’s called Friday, and I’ll just have the same note and rewrite it as Saturday tomorrow. But I have this note is in three sections, and the first section at the top is things that are time critical, and by that I mean things that must happen today, because today is the only day in which those things can occur. So, for example, this podcast, and anything that’s a specific time on that particular day goes at the top of the list. And then I have a gap, and then I have a section which is a list of things that I really, really intend to do today. It’s but if for whatever reason it’s impossible to do them today, it’s okay because those things are not specifically time critical, like a meeting or something like that. So the key thing is that you are aware, and the system is serving you by letting you know the things that you absolutely have to focus on, and then it’s telling you the things that you intend to focus on. But if you fail to, it’s not the end of the world. And then below that, I have the “Wouldn’t it be nice if there were 40-eight hours in a day? list, which is the things that if I get a moment free, I’m going to deal with it. But it’s not critical that I do it today. And so, by dividing my list of tasks up into three in that way, I minimize my thinking effort during the day because when I finish a task, I can just look at the list and I can think, okay, so what what’s next? Now, of course, if your primary function in a day is to cut a movie, it’s fairly straightforward. You know, you’re going to have step one: edit this edit this film, but there are other things that you need to do. It might be that in the course of the day, your boss wants to have a meeting at 2o’clock so that 2o’clock meeting goes at the top of the list and it’s right there, ready for you to see and to be clear about what you’re doing. And every day, I look in my calendar and I check what’s coming up the next day, and so I prepare my day the day before. So when I come, when I wake up in the morning, one of the first things I do, you know, I’ll I’ll do a quick email check, Facebook, Twitter, all of that stuff. Skim through it, get rid of the stuff that isn’t important. Flag up the things that I’ll I’ll be dealing with later, and I’ll look down this list and I’ll look in the calendar to see if I missed anything, and then I’m kind of tuned in. I’m ready. I know what I’m doing, and it’s again, it’s about laying the information out there earlier, so that later you come to it and you don’t have to think you can just get on with the task.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, now you’ve opened up Pandora’s box, my friend. Oh my God, did you open Pandora’s box? Because you hit the number one thing that I geek out on, which is how to prioritize a day and time, and that is one of the habits and rituals that I’ve established. Is for 15 to 20 minutes a night before I do the evening meditation and the cold shower and all the things to wind down. I figure out what does my day tomorrow look like the whole day from the time that I leave work because my morning ritual is the same, but from the time that I leave work until the time I get home and start my evening ritual, what do I need to do? And I lay everything out because again, I’m minimizing decisions. So all I have to do is literally, it’s like I just have somebody standing next to me saying, “You need to do this now. You need to do this now. You need to do this now. So I’ve automated my day, maximizing the energy for the creative decision. And I’m gonna help you and anybody listening take this to the next level. You, my friend, need to get OmniFocus because if you’re somebody that has multiple projects and literally multiple businesses that are completely different from each other, which is an exact-that’s an exact mirror of my life, where I’m not just a guy that wakes up and edits a TV show and has dailies. I’m managing a podcast. I’m writing blog posts. I have a documentary film that I have just released that’s out into the world. Like I, and they’re all completely disconnected from each other. It’s not like they’re the same things. So it’s like, well, what’s what? Like you said, what’s the most important and urgent? What’s the most urgent but not important? Like you’re you’re breaking all those things down. But what you can do is you can take it to the complete next level, and I swear to God, you’re going to look at this and you’re going to you’re going to hear this sound from the sky opening going. So what you need to do is you need to get OmniFocus, and I will put a link in the show notes, and I will personally email you a link to the training that I use to learn it. Because if you just bought the app and you opened it up. You’d be like, “I don’t get it. I have no idea how to use this. But I will send you the training that taught me how to use it. It’s called OmniFocus Premium Posts. It’s from the guys at Asian Efficiency. It’s literally changed my life. What I did is I took one week over Christmas vacation and I said, “All right, I know that I need to learn how to manage my time better. I am so frenetic, and the story of my entire life was crap. What do I need to do now? What is it that’s important? What should I be doing right now? And I wasted so much energy, and I was so disorganized, and that was just a force multiplier that destroyed my entire day every day. When I incorporated OmniFocus, the amount of stress relief that I got was immense, and it improves the quality of my sleep because I don’t have to remember to do anything anymore. I literally don’t have there’s there’s no part of my brain that’s saying, “Oh, what am I supposed to do in an hour? That was my life. It was okay. I got to stick this in my brain. Got to remember what to do in an hour. And you can’t. Your brain isn’t capable of doing that. So I remember nothing, but I have the system automated to the point where I will just get these alerts, or I can go into my my OmniFocus plan and say, “Oh yeah, this is what I’m supposed to do today. But if you ask me right now, what is it that I’m supposed to do when I go to work in an hour or an hour and a half? I have no idea what I’m supposed to do, but I have this personal assistant on my computer and on my phone, called OmniFocus, that says this is the most important thing you need to be doing right now.

Zack Arnold: These are the things that you have to do today that are time sensitive. Like you said, here are the list of things that if you have 48 hours today, knock out all these things and it’s great. But I never think to myself, oh wait, should I be working on go far right now? Should I be working on fitness and post, should I be in dailies? Like all that’s gone, and what that has done to my stress level and my productivity is absolutely immense. So I think that’s going to be a game changer for you. So I’m going to send you a link to that because you’re doing the same thing in Evernote. You’re spending a lot of extra time that you don’t need to be spending organizing it and manually thinking. All right, this is what I’m supposed to be doing today. That’s important. That’s urgent. That’s not important. That’s not urgent. And this will take what you’re already doing to the next level. So conceptually, conceptually, you have it nailed as far as the technical process and how to get more out of it. OmniFocus will be your best friend. So I think that you’re going to absolutely love it. So yeah,

Maxim Jago: But on the same, I I don’t I have no idea what what’s next. It’s all out of my head and into the system, and that’s important.

Zack Arnold: It’s not only important; it’s vital because then you’re saving all of your energy from making the creative decisions that you cannot automate. Which is the reason that we’re hired to do what we do. I heard a great quote, and I can’t remember who said it. It was when I was at Edit Fest. We get paid for our opinions, right? As editors, people are paying for our opinions, so it’s not just do you know Avid and what does your resume look like. If you don’t like my opinions and the choices that I make, I’m not right for your project. But if you don’t have the energy to make those decisions and bring your opinions to it, then there’s no reason for you to be there. So that’s why it’s so important to have these different, you know, just systems in your life, and kind of going back to the nitty gritty of the editing process and what you can do to to maximize organization. Having bin structures and knowing where everything is and being able to access it almost on an automated process is one huge thing. The other one that I think is just as important that most people miss is how to actually organize and name your sequences and your versioning, because I I will find, and I’m sure that you’ve seen this, where it’s like, yes, my sequence is Untitled 01 dot locked dot revised dot new lock, and it’s just like I want to shoot you in the face right now. Like, are you kidding me? Can

Maxim Jago: I can I tell you my system, which is immensely simple? I have one bin called Master Sequence. Inside that bin is one sequence only. Nothing else. It’s empty. It’s just one thing. It’s a sequence called master sequence. And then I have two other sequence bins. One’s called backup sequences, and the other one’s called experimental sequences. So as I’m working through the cut, let’s say I get to the end of the assembly, I duplicate my. Sequence. I rename the copy Assembly One, and I put that in the backup sequences bin. And then, as you go through, you get through your first rough cut towards your fine cuts. Maybe you get towards picture lock if you’re blessed and you have that in your world as a thing. Which, by the way, if you can incorporate picture lock as an idea, and just for just for clarity, that means no frames will be added and no frames will be removed. This is the content. You’re still maybe going to work on the audio. You’re still going to maybe work on the effects, but these are the frames of content, and we all agree we’re not going to change them. If you can have picture lock as a thing in your world, it dramatically opens up productivity in post. And

Zack Arnold: Could could you do me a favor? Could you call the studio executives and the I know they don’t get it. Could you explain to them that that that actually is a good thing? Because there’s no such thing as picture lock on Empire doesn’t exist. But

Maxim Jago: You know the problem with not having picture lock is that you end up redoing a ton of work, and the people, the execs, don’t understand just how much work it is. If you’re you know you might grade a shot, right? So you do some basic color work on a shot that takes a few minutes. You do it and looks okay, and then they say, “Oh, actually, let’s add another whatever five frames to this cut. And it just so happens that those five frames introduce a new color element that breaks the look, and so now you’ve got to spend a whole other. You just got to redo all that time doing the color work on that clip. All you have to do is change the when the picture lock happens. At the moment, picture lock is probably happening at the last possible moment where you know there’s nothing left to do because you’ve got no more time, and you say, “Okay, go for it, and that’s picture lock. But if you can decide that picture lock occurs before you do, for example, your graphics, your audio work, you know the mix before the mix, before the graphics, before the special effects work. The exception being if there’s work that is fundamental that you have to do before you can do the cut. For example, very simple example, you might have a shot that’s badly calibrated and you don’t know if it can be used, so then it would be legitimate for you to do some color work on it. Don’t do the fine finishing color work, but just do some color work on it to make sure that it’s usable. And if it’s usable, okay, fine, we can keep it in the cut. But doing all this fine detail work and then having execs say, “Oh, actually, oh yeah, I forgot to mention I really wanted this other thing, and the net net is you work harder, you don’t produce as good work, the the project is less efficient, and all they have to do is set a different deadline for that decision. Instead of it being at the very very very very end, you say okay whatever phase three you know we’re going to organize the media we’re going to do the cut, and phase three is we we sign off picture lock, and then we do all the other stuff, and and you make it into a culture of disapproval if somebody asks for a change to the content after picture lock. So obviously it’s possible, but

Zack Arnold: And the the key to the culture of disapproval is the money, because when you when you tell an executive, oh yeah, well it’s it’s going to require a lot more work if we lock picture this day and we need to do this and that, like okay, so right. But then if you say, well, sorry, if if we do that, it’s going to cost you an extra 25,000 Oh, hold on a second. No, no, no. Okay, picture lock sounds good, right? I want to go back for a second to you talking specifically about the way that you you name your sequences because I think that’s it’s so vital. And when people will often say, “Oh well, you know, I have my own system, or you know, I do this or I do that, and it’s fine. But what what people need to understand is that a huge, huge part of being a successful editor, or doesn’t have to just be editing; it could be graphic design, could be visual effects, is your ability to access things very, very quickly. Because if you’re in a room with a producer or a director, and they’re sitting there on their phone for 10 minutes waiting for you to find a shot. They become impatient and they start making bad decisions, and they start to multitask, and you don’t have their focus. So you need to be able to do things so fast where they say, “Oh wait, you already did that, right? Like that’s something I get all the time, where I’ll work with a producer or a director, and they’ll just by habit, start going to their phone or going to their computer. I was like, “All right, it’s ready to look at. And they’re like, “Wait, it’s ready to look at now. I’m like, “Yeah, it’s ready. And they don’t understand how I do it and what I what I want to explain to people. It’s the organizational system that makes it so easy to access this stuff. So what I do with my sequences, which is a little bit more complex than yours, but it’s the same basic idea, because I edited a TV show that has commercial breaks, and I know that there are a lot of people that will be working in unscripted television. In reality, most people are still working on shows that have commercial breaks, and they’re not doing one long thing. Or if you’re even on a feature film, there’s still the convention of editing and reels. So I never have an entire show in one sequence. So if it’s a 42-minute show, or I’ve cut several features. When it’s a feature, it’s not a 100-minute sequence, and the reason for that is because I cannot access information quickly. I look at a timeline the way that a composer looks at a sheet of music, and if I can’t find a specific scene or a section of a scene just by looking at my timeline, that means I need to change something about my. System, because if they say, “Oh, hey, can you go back to this one scene at this one part? Bam, I find it because visually I know where it is in my timeline, and that’s because no timeline is ever more than about 12 minutes long. So what I do is I will create a new bin for every version that I’m on. So let’s say I’m on editor’s cut. In editor’s cut, I will have six sequences, and each of those will be by act, so act one, act two, act three, act four, act five, act six, right? And then when I send out that editor’s cut and there’s an output, I create a new folder or new bin depending on which NLE that you’re in. But what I do is I number them, so it would be one dot episode name editor’s cut, two dot episode name director’s cut, right?

Zack Arnold: But what what I will then do is I will create sub folders or sub bins based on inter versions because like in TV it’s very clear there’s editors cut directors cut producers cut studio cut network cut lock right so it’s very disciplined and regimented and it’s the same for every episode but there might be a time where you have a director that wants to look at a work in progress, and then they want to see another work in progress, and you go back and forth, and it’s kind of messy. So I’ll have like two A, 2b 2c still director’s cuts, so I can find all the different versions, and in each one of those bins, it still has the six sequences. But the key, and this is this was really the game changer, is when I kind of cracked this code is I could never figure out if they would send me notes and say, “Oh yeah, at this time code I want to do this, this, or that. I’m like, “Oh crap, what version is that? Oh wait, this doesn’t match because when you send out an output of an entire show, your timecode is continuous. So they say, “Well, 30-seven minutes and 14 seconds, and I’m like, “Crap! All of my sequences are smaller, so that timecode means nothing. So what I do is we will have a separate output bin or output sequence where it’ll be the full built show, but the number of that folder or that bin is exactly the same as the number that I’m using for my cut. So if I know they’re saying, “Hey, you know, in the director’s cut, work in progress too, which went out on this day at 30-seven minutes and 14 seconds cut this shot. So I just go into that bin, which I know is bin labeled to be because that’s the cut in my cuts bin that was 2b and then I find that time code and then I can go to my sequence and see where it matches. And now you look at the entire you know lifetime of a show of a specific episode, you know what every single cut that went out corresponds to every single output that went out, and I can find things really, really quickly. So when I’m in a room and a producer says, “Ah, you know what? I saw this earlier version. Let’s just go back to that. Some editors will take 15 minutes to say, “Oh, you got to give me some time. I got to find that version. I got to dig through. And with me, it’s the snap of a finger. Again, I’m not making decisions. I know exactly where it is mathematically based on the organizational system, and that’s part of the reason people love to work with me because they don’t have to sit around and wait. I just know where everything is at the push of a button, and that becomes a hireable skill. That’s the kind of thing that people talk about and why they want to refer you, which equals more money and more work. And I think that key to this is that you took maybe five minutes out one day and thought, okay, if I were to design a system so that I’ve organized myself in my bins and I know where my content is, what system would I like? It’s literally five minutes, and you sit down and think, well, I suppose you know I’d name my sequence as this, and because you know your system, and because you have a system, you can be immensely productive and really, really fast with it. I love that idea. You know that

Maxim Jago: You know that it’s going to be four bins down is where your music is going to be because you do get a kind of a muscle memory. There’s this whole inner world model, and we probably don’t have time to go into it now. But this idea that you’re interacting with a model of the world in your head, not the actual world, and so if the model matches the real world, you’re that much faster, that much easier to navigate it. So if you know that you’re expecting music to be four bins down, and your hand will already start moving, you know you’ll already be on your way there, and moving towards the bin before you even realize you’re doing it, and it will be where you’re expecting it. And all of that means, as you say, you don’t have to think; you can just concentrate on the creative process. And again, if you say, right, you know, stage two is going to be number two dot A B C D or whatever, that process, I think, with matching back the time code, is a little bit easier when you’re using an NLE that supports nesting. You can collapse tracks in in Meteor Composer, but it doesn’t have that kind of dynamic nesting functionality, which is which is a boon for things where you’re working in multi-part sequences that are going to be combined later. But it’s not that big a deal. You know, you can always it doesn’t take that long to throw sequences together and get the time code references, but it’s it’s about making the decision. I think that you are going to be organized. That really is underpinning all of this. That if you decide you’re going to take a moment out and choose a system, whatever that system is, it’s a very small investment of time. But you have to decide. You’re going to do it. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: It’s it’s really just all about devising the system, and somebody can listen and say, “Well, I don’t know if I would number it that way. That’s fine. Like, I’m not saying the way that I do it is the way everybody should do it. What I’m saying is that this system works for me. The takeaway, the action step, is not do it my way. It’s find a system because most people don’t even have a system, and what you need is to understand well how do I build that system. So what I’m doing right now as we speak is I’m actually building an entire training program and learning system. It’s the kind of thing that you do for a living as well, where you can’t say, “Oh, so I understand in theory what you’re talking about, but how do I actually do it? Right? Just tell me step one through 10. That’s what I’m building right now to help people become more efficient editors or help become more active editors, whatever the case may be, I want to actually give people that system. So it’s just what action steps, right? Here’s the big picture. Here’s the full strategy. Now, how do I actually implement it on a day-to-day basis to actually become better at what I do, find more jobs, and make more money? So that’s kind of the the task at hand that I have right now is building that to help people do that. Because if I want to learn how to use Adobe Premiere Pro, I go and I get the classroom in a book from Maxim Jago, or I go to Lynda.com, right? Yeah. But if I want to build these systems, you can’t just go online and say, “All right, tell me what to do step by step. It’s all these little tiny articles from this website and this blog and that blog, but there’s no cohesive system to figure all that out. At least that I can find. If it exists, I can’t find it. So that’s what I want to be able to bring to this industry is just this this really great, simple, easy to follow system. Where I’m not saying do it my way. I’m saying here’s how to create it your own way. Right.

Maxim Jago: Nice.

Zack Arnold: So that that that’s kind of the next step and the next evolution for for fitness and post is just offering that really easy to follow guide for how do I just optimize my own operating system because I always say to people that it doesn’t matter what computer you’re on or what your RAM system how much RAM or memory you have like none of that matters if you’re not optimizing your own operating system that’s all just moot so that that’s really what I want to do is here. Here’s the way to hack your own operating system to get more out of it. Then everything just kind of falls into place.

Maxim Jago: Yeah.

Zack Arnold: So so on that note, literally, like I could go for 10 hours. Like I’m so jacked up talking about this stuff, but I know that you’ve got a life, and I’ve got a a show to cut as well. So such a

Maxim Jago: Lot to do, and I’m sure you do as well. It’s

Zack Arnold: Yes. So I’m going to make sure to email you about OmniFocus, and I’m going to put information in the show notes about OmniFocus because it’s an absolute life changer. If you’re a plate spinner, and we’re both plate spinners, that’s what I do for a living: is I spin plates, so I know all about that. But this has been tremendously, tremendously fun, and I guarantee you that that we’re this is going to become a regular thing where you’re going to come back on, and we’re just going to we’re going to get meta about everything. I’d

Maxim Jago: Love that. Yeah, that’s very very cool. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. One

Maxim Jago: More final tip. Yes, because I really wanted to mention this. Don’t underestimate the value of intuition. You know, when you just you don’t know why, but you find yourself thinking I should probably do this now. Do

Zack Arnold: It. I love that. That’s great, especially for people that are editors or visual effects artists or designers. You just you sit there and you belabor a decision. You’re like, ah, should I do it this way or that way? Like instinct, you got to learn to hone that as a skill and understand that. Well, this is what I think works, so I’m going to do it. Right, like probably worry

Maxim Jago: Less about it. Just do it, and yes, see if it’s okay. Anyway, that’s my my final tip.

Zack Arnold: No, that’s that’s fantastic. Well, I’m going to let you get back to you, but this has been awesome. So thank you so much, Maxim.

Maxim Jago: Absolute pleasure. Yeah, looking forward to the next one.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and this show is executive produced by Kanen Flowers. We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.

The music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Dorian Cheah from his brilliant album ARA.