Transcript
Zack Arnold: So I’m here today with Jeff Greenberg, and I am going to give a little bit of a disclaimer here. I have no agenda whatsoever today for speaking to Jeff Greenberg, and here’s why: all you need to do is ask Jeff one question, and he will drop about 150 knowledge bombs on you. So I’ve already been proven this morning that that’s the case because I’ve been on the phone with Jeff for three minutes and he’s already sent me a mind map that has about 155 amazing things that we could talk about today. So on that note, welcome Jeff,
Jeff Greenberg: Zack. I’m blushing already. I’m I I suffer from the same problem we all have, which is I struggle with each and every piece of this. The fact that anything I might have to say is useful, I’m always thrilled by.
Zack Arnold: Well, I have no doubt that there’s going to be at least 10 things that come out of it that are going to help me, but will also help everybody else that’s listening. So, we’ve been trying to schedule this thing forever. I’m super, super excited about it. You’re very, very well known and a very good resource in the I guess for the lack of better word like the NLE community or somebody that I met at God I don’t even remember which one it was anymore I think it was we met
Jeff Greenberg: At I know where we met are you kidding me we met at Adobe Video World that’s showing and I then brought Robbie Carmen to you because ready for this, Zack, I was excited to meet you,
Zack Arnold: Which is funny because I was right after I had started the program, and I look back on where it was 18 months ago, and I kind of cringed looking at the website and the like I had no idea what I was doing, and frankly, I’m still not sure that I do. But you had come over, and do you remember what it was that you had said to me?
Jeff Greenberg: No, I remember the generalized conversation. But go ahead.
Zack Arnold: Well, I remember the first thing you said to me, and it’s something that has stuck ever since. And it’s one of the reasons that I’ve continued this amidst all of the struggles and you know just banging my head against a wall. You literally, you didn’t know who I was. I had no idea who you were. You gave me a big hug and you said, “It is about time somebody did this, and I was like, and you were the very first person that really made me realize that I might be onto something. So that was that was very very encouraging for me. But that’s actually how we met. So I actually wanted that to start our conversation, and I want to know why you said that. Why you said it is about time somebody did this? A
Jeff Greenberg: Couple reasons. First of which is this field is just horrendous for our health. I, some 20 years ago, was probably about 50 pounds less than I am now. I was lifting seriously, regularly, and I’ve been watching my body slowly degrade as I get older, as I get, more sedentary, and I just started to try to aggressively stand more. I taken the box and put it under equipment, and I stumbled across what you were doing. And you know, when we we first met, you know, I I thought, and I still think, you know, there there are some things out there that are you’re doing which are amazing that I have to experiment with myself a little bit with things like, and I’ve tried. I’m right now still using bulletproof coffee. I’m still playing with what’s the shake?
Zack Arnold: Shakeology.
Jeff Greenberg: Shakeology. I’m not doing that as regularly as I’d like, but it’s just the idea that our field is just so destructive to health, we’re asked to a normal day for anybody else on the planet. Well, not really anybody else, but is is an eight-hour day, a 10-hour day. We’re expected to do a 10-hour day. We’re the last person that people think about as far as health, and we sit behind a desk. It’s just, it’s going to kill us. You just had the right information at the right spot for me, and that’s what made it magic.
Zack Arnold: Well, that’s awesome. I’m really, really glad to hear that. And I know that when it first came out, everybody, first of all, was like, “Fitness and post. What the heck does that mean? It’s an oxymoron. And then, as they started to investigate it a little bit, it was like, “Oh, well, it’s selling protein powders and Beachbody products, and it’s like no, no, no, no, no. There’s more to it than that. I promise, right? But it was really hard for me to kind of figure out what it was. Like I was basically at a white glove convention trying to sell chocolate popsicles. I’m like, all right, I’m trying to sell fitness and health to this community, which is I thought was impossible and was a losing battle. But I really feel like I’ve struck a nerve recently, kind of going into the struggles that I’ve been through myself, and finding out that, and this this has made me so angry since I’ve written the
Jeff Greenberg: Posts about the burnout that I’ve been through. I’ve had so many people say this is my life right now, and I’m realizing that this industry is just destroying all of us, and there’s just there’s got to be some way to to climb out, and I’m hoping that the way to do it is by collectively everybody starting to figure out these tiny little things that they can tweak and fix and make a little bit better and a little bit better, and all of a sudden that collective momentum starts to help us make larger changes. So that’s kind of what what this thing has been evolving into. I mean, that was one of those things that you and I, when we were first speaking, when I introduced you to Robbie Carmen, that we just instantly kind of had the same, or at least you heard me echo some of the things that I think you talk about. But it’s this idea that you can’t change your entire life in one day. It’s that we want to do these small little changes over time, and to me emotionally, I’m trying to learn from everybody I meet. We we just before we started speaking, you know, we talked about the fact that we both have a child around the same age, and when my child was born, all I was trying to do was mine from the people that I know. I was trying to use them as an information filter for me not to make all the mistakes myself. I’m I don’t have the time in life to make them all myself, and I think fitness and post in a lot of ways for me is somebody who’s gone and says, “Look, I tried this. I got some good results with it. You should try it, or you know what, I tried it and it didn’t do much for me at all. You might as well skip it. And just that as a filter is huge for me.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s really where this all started. Was hey, here’s a list of all these things that I do that have worked, and here’s a list of other crap I’ve done in 10 years that haven’t worked, and now I’m I’m hoping it can be that, but also be more educational as well and more inspirational, and so I’m still trying to really figure out what it is, but I’m narrowing it down to things that I’m really finding people are responding to, and that was one of the reasons that I wanted to bring you on today. I think the part of today will definitely be from the productivity ninja perspective, so to speak, with NLEs, because every time I talk to you, you teach me at least five new amazing things about Avid or Premiere that I’d never even knew were possible, but at the same time, the other reason I wanted to have you on is that you are out and about in the world of post production, probably more than just about anybody else on the planet. You are at all the conferences and doing the teachings, and you speak to so many people in our field. So, what I wanted to ask you about what are the most common problems, challenges, issues that people are always coming to you with? It doesn’t have to be health related; it can be. But I’m assuming that people come to you all the time with issues when it comes to NLE’s or editing in general. Like, what do you feel is the consensus big issue or issues that people just seem to come to you with over, over, and over.
Jeff Greenberg: I I get a couple different things from a couple different levels in the field. For the people who are fairly new in the field, there there’s really two things that I see. One is I see that they don’t know their tool terribly well, and they’ve gotten a modicum of success. They’ve managed to get something exported, and they think they know the best way to do things. I think this is a fault we all have. Is and see if this makes sense to you. To make something easy to use, it’s got to be very tactile. It’s got to be very drag and drop friendly. But that method that we first learn how to use these tools is probably the worst way to work. So, if you really want to use the tools well, you need to look underneath that layer, underneath that first learning layer. So, when I I meet people in their first say five years of this journey, the the question always is, well, what is should the editorial tool I use, which almost doesn’t matter to me, and then the second is what could I be doing better? And we miss Zack. Did you? I don’t know. Did you like really intern and work as an assistant for a long time for somebody else?
Zack Arnold: No, that’s actually one part of my journey that I really haven’t experienced at all. Really, is being an assistant, which drives people absolutely crazy, and when I tell them that, but I was only an assistant for five months, and that was an assistant at a trailer house, and half the time I was still kind of helping do some editing work. So I’ve never been through kind of the the assistant ringer, so to speak. So pretty much every part of the workflow, when it comes to assisting or whatnot, are things that I kind of had to figure out on my own, being an editor in low budget features, being my own assistant. So in that sense, I was my own assistant on like three feature films where they didn’t have a budget for an assistant, but I was also cutting the the film. But like being in the world of being an assistant editor on a TV show, or on big budget features, or in reality, I’ve never actually been an assistant other than in trailers for about four or five months.
Jeff Greenberg: Okay, so that exact thing, I suffered from a little bit, but I also had really good mentor relationships in my editorial life. I’m not in LA, at least not anymore. I was there for about a year. the The biggest thing that I think collectively we as self-taught as autodidacts that we miss is we miss that thing where somebody goes, “Hey, I’m going to have you sit in the room with a client in the room. Your job is to shut up and watch the way I interact with.” The client, so you know that editing isn’t just about cutting the story; it’s also about relating to another human being. I think that’s just kind of missing, and so, so at a certain level, from the novice level, I think that they’re missing some sort of friend, of mentorship friend to go hear some of the dumb mistakes. In some ways, I’d like to think it almost mirrors what fitness in post is trying to be. I think we’re missing that in our field. And when I meet a lot of people who are new to the field, they just have no path. They have nobody over their shoulder who’s more experienced to go. Yeah, you need to make that mistake. No, you know, you shouldn’t be making this mistake. I think we miss that, and and it breaks my heart.
Zack Arnold: Well, and I think that that’s also just a symptom of how much easier it is now to do everything yourself, where you can buy a video camera, you can get iMovie for free, or you can get Final Cut X for a few $100 or you can get Adobe Premiere for 20, $30 a month, and you can just go and learn on your own, which I think is great. I think that that’s something that I wish I’ve been able to do when I was younger, because I was learning on my own using two VCRs, and my younger listeners are going on Google VCR. What in the world is he talking about? But that’s how I learned. But it was all self-taught. But you’re right; there is a certain point where you just start making all the same mistakes, and you get in a rut. And I do remember, and I’d been doing this for for years in college, learning on my own, doing all these different things. And then when I had my first job at the trailer house, all of a sudden I was working in a collaborative environment, and I would do something, and they would be like, “No, no, no! There’s a much better way to do that. And all of a sudden, my learning became exponentially greater because I was bouncing ideas off of people, and they were telling me, “There’s a better way. You can do this. You can do that. Have you thought about this? And that just kind of totally opened my mind to realize, “Wait a second! It’s not just the way I learned from this one book. There are so many infinite different ways to do this, and I’ve never ever had a mentor relationship with somebody in the room, so to speak. I have a couple of editing mentors for just kind of learning the business and asking them questions about politics or about jobs, but I’ve never actually had an editor per se that I have worked with and gone to and said, “Hey, teach me how to do this. Teach me how to do that. So it’s been tough in that sense, where I’ve always kind of had to be self-taught. But then I seek out people like you, and I go to these events, like going to editors retreat last year. Which anybody listening go to editors’ retreat for the love of all that is holy. Oh my God, it’s such a fantastic event. And I’ll actually put a link. If you send me a link, I’ll put a link in the show. I’ll send
Jeff Greenberg: You a link. It’s going to be our 10th year this year. We got big things going on. I want to return it though. I want to take it off of my my need to self promote. I think the biggest thing that’s missing is a sense of peer review of peer relationships along those lines, and particularly in post production, where we all sit in a room by ourselves, or we just talk to one human being, it is the least social in that regard of everything to do with the field. And when you you find that you’re doing the same work day in day out, when you’re finding you’re doing the same thing, I think that’s part of what learns to leads to burnout, leads to ruts, and so it’s the sort of thing where I I really believe that once a week, you know, you should have your stuff screened by your friends, you know, friends in the field, people who can give you the right level of feedback. I remember making the mistake of showing a a couple scenes from a screenplay to some family, and I listened to their criticism because they were family, and I love them. But their feedback was the wrong sort of feedback for screenwriting. And in the same respect, I think that your our peers give us better feedback when it comes to video editing, and we need that to push ourselves to that next level.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, because even if it’s somebody that may not have as much experience, or they have twice as much experience, it really doesn’t matter because they understand the basic mindset that you’re in. They’ve probably been at the stage that you are, and they know how to give the right kind of thoughts. And sometimes their notes are still going to suck, but at the end of the day, they still have a sense of here’s the language that I can speak to really constructively help you. Because the worst feedback in the world is, oh, it’s great, I loved it. Okay, well that doesn’t help me. I appreciate it, but that doesn’t help me. That’s sometimes the kind of thing you’re going to get from family and friends, or they’re going to say things like, well, could this character? I didn’t like the red sweater. Is there something you can do about the red sweater? And you’re like, no. But if you’re talking to people in the field, they understand what you can do, what you can’t do. They understand story. They really understand how you can make actual changes. So I can see why that would that would make a big difference. So the the other
Jeff Greenberg: Part of that is something my dad taught me, which is play with somebody better than yourself. In other words, if you’re going to play any sport, play with somebody who’s a little bit better, somebody who’s really way better than you. They’re going to be bored by you, but somebody who’s a little bit better is going to force you to rise the occasion. Is going to force you to to take it and push yourself a little bit, and I try to do that. You know, with everything I do, I try to be around people who push me in some sort of way. Zack, for me, a lot of my friendship with you is based in the fact that at the end of the day, I know that I should be healthier, and fitness and post is inspirational for me. Whether or not I’m successful is irrelevant. The act of acknowledging it has me move the ball downhill just a little bit further.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that and that’s great. I mean, that makes me feel fantastic because that’s a that’s the whole point. Something that I tell Natalie, my assistant, ad nauseum is I say, listen, I know that me running a 13-mile Spartan race in the mountains is not going to get other people in post-production to run 13-mile Spartan races in the mountains. I totally get that, but if somebody listens and says, “Oh, well, maybe I should take a 15-minute walk every day, bam, win. Like that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do is just create that mindset where now all of a sudden the idea of actually focusing on ourselves-not because we’re selfish, but because it’s going to make us better at what we do and make us more hireable, make our work better-the conversation is there, right? It doesn’t mean that people are going to mimic what I’m doing, which is totally fine, but the conversation is there.
Jeff Greenberg: I’ll go a step further in the idea that you are happier with who you are as a human being, you have more nurturing and happier relationships in life. When I sit back and I go, I’m going to go and work out today on the Nordic track in my basement for a half hour. In the back of my head, I’m doing it because I got a little girl that I want to be here 2030, years from now, and I want to be as active as I can in her life.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s really what it’s all about, and something that I preach over and over in the the groups that I’ve run in the past, and in the the courses that I’m developing now, is it’s all about the why. You have to develop a why, and if your why is something like I want to lose 20 pounds in 90 days, or I want to fit into a swimsuit. That’s just not going to do it because when you need to make the tough choices and your habits are broken and the stress is high, you need to have a big enough and important enough why to be able to do it. I think that what you’re saying about going and doing the exercise, you can’t have a much better example than your own child, right? And it’s the same thing for me. And this is-it seems like a really small thing, but it’s really not. But we were-you were making a joke beforehand. You’d sent me a message on Skype because we’re recording this at six a.m. Pacific time, and you sent me a message at like 540 saying, “Well, you’ve probably worked out for an hour already, so let me know when you’re done. But it’s funny. I’ve been talking about how I’ve been establishing a morning routine so I can just find more balance in the day and not feel overwhelmed, but I’ve never ever ever been a morning person. I’ve hated mornings my whole life. When I was growing up on a farm, your parents knock on your door at six a.m. It’s just the worst hell on earth. But what has happened in the last couple of years? I mean, I’ve had I have a son who’s almost six now, so that’s kind of forced me to become a morning person. But just because I’m awake at five or six a.m. with my kids doesn’t actually mean I’m awake. I was just complete zombie, wasn’t focusing on anything, and was going through the motions. And I said, “This has got to change. And it wasn’t the fact that I wanted to be more productive or the fact that I wanted to have more energy or get more done that actually turned me into a morning person. It was knowing that now my son leaves for preschool at six a.m. with my wife because she teaches third grade and they go to the same school, so they have a long drive and they leave at six a.m. And my why is that I need to be awake and present to say goodbye to my son and give him a hug, and that’s it.
Jeff Greenberg: That’s a great reason to be awake. I think there are a couple of just amazing things you just said in there. I don’t even know if you know them. I want to unravel just a couple. First, you talked about both. You didn’t talk about this directly, but I think you talked about being a night person versus a day person. So I one want to call attention to the fact that this is the only field I know about where we measure ourselves by how much sleep we can go without, which is probably the stupidest thing I can ever imagine. I’m such a fan of now trying to get eight hours of sleep, and the correlations between seven and nine hours and the year you die, you know, the age you die at is unbelievable. I mean, there’s a strong correlation that getting less than seven hours or more than nine hours means you die earlier, and I’m like one of those guys who would used to go, “Oh, I can make it on four hours of sleep. What a fool! What a fool I was!
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s something that I found in the the response to the burnout post and. Again, I’ll have links in the show notes to both of those posts that have come out so far, and there will be more in the series. But everybody is sending me these messages saying, “Well, it’s just such a badge of honor in my office. The guy that gets the least amount of sleep and works the most amount of hours, and that culture has just got to change. It’s crazy because the number one force multiplier that’s going to dictate whether or not you were good at your job, whether or not you were in a good mood, whether or not you’re going to live longer, is the amount of sleep that your body is getting. And I was the exact same way that you were. It was like, oh yeah, I did. You know, got through around three hours of sleep last night, and I’m a night person, and I do my best work at 3 a.m. But maybe that works when you’re 22 or 23. But by the time you get to even be my age, and I don’t consider myself old at all. I’m 35, but you get to that age, and it just starts destroying you. And what I found happened when I had my second child. The first child is a huge adjustment, but with the second one, it’s a completely different kind of adjustment because with the first one, it’s really exhausting. But you get breaks. They take a nap, you take a nap. Like there are ways to kind of work around it. When the second one comes, it’s a whole different world. And the first year of my daughter’s life, I have no memory of because I was so sleep deprived that it destroyed my brain. And since then, I have no short term memory. I almost feel like I’m Leonard Shelby from Memento, where I’m like, I don’t remember anything. But because of that, I’ve created all these amazing systems to make sure that I do get everything done that I need to do. I don’t forget when people ask me to do things. I’m not putting tattoos on my arm or my chest, but I have the digital version of kind of doing that. And it was all because of sleep deprivation and nothing else. I had the memory of an elephant. I could remember everybody’s phone numbers, addresses. I went through all of college without barely having a planner, and I went to the University of Michigan, which is not a terribly easy school to get through. I didn’t even write stuff down. I got all my assignments done. It was just there. Now I don’t even remember to get dressed. I have to write everything down because sleep deprivation destroyed my brain. So sleep is so important, and there. So so
Jeff Greenberg: Hold on a second. I think I think though this is the t here is this arrogance we have in our 20s that we’re handling it, and what we don’t realize maybe is we’re not we’re not handling it. We’re not night people. You’re not suddenly going to break 400,000 years of evolution because you got a blue light coming from your computer screen telling your brain to be awake. Yeah, exactly.
Zack Arnold: And I think that one thing that I want to clarify is I think that there are people that are genuinely night people that are on different circadian rhythms. All of which can be changed, by the way. I’ve learned through my research, that you’re not just born a certain way, you can very easily shift your your circadian rhythms, and I’ve done so. Where now I’m up at like 540-five like a bullet, and I pass out around 830 or 1030 No, not even. I can’t
Jeff Greenberg: Make it there. I’m like at 9o’clock I’m dying.
Zack Arnold: No, my magic number is seven, and I’ve experimented, and I’ve gotten up to eight in nine hours, and it just doesn’t work for me. I feel more tired and I feel more groggy. But if I hit seven hours almost on the nut, I wake up. I have plenty of energy all day. I don’t need to take a nap. I’m not foggy. So seven just became my magic number. But I really found that you can shift your circadian rhythm. So if there’s somebody out there that’s like, oh well, I’m a night person. Do I need to shift it? If you’re still getting seven, eight hours of sleep and you wake up at 10 a.m. because your schedule allows it, that’s great. It’s the idea of I’m a night person, but I still get up at seven or 8o’clock in the morning and get four hours of sleep. You might as well just smoke two packs a day. Well, I got actually. I think it’s even worse than smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. I
Jeff Greenberg: Have an interesting thought for you though, I don’t. I don’t necessarily agree at this point, and this is what what makes me disagree with that. Just the if you get enough sleep, I think that at 3o’clock when you’re passing out in front of the keyboard, it was too late. You should have already been asleep, and what I remember because I used to do this. I used to sit in front of my system, and I’d be up 1234, in the morning. Sometimes getting up at eight, sometimes getting up at 10 or 11 because I could. I think that that leaves you almost in a perpetual deficit, from what I can see, from what I can recall of my own lack of sleep. Now, coming back to burnout with sleep. If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re feeling burnt out, I got two simple things I’d want you to do. I’d want you to try and for a week get nine or 10 hours of sleep, because there’s nothing like depression and a lack of sleep, and the other is probably some vitamin D in the morning because you’re not getting enough sunlight either, and I think those two things at least can pull you back from the brink of thinking your life is over.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, that that’s a really really good place to start, and that’s really kind of the the last time that I went through it is where I started was just saying, all right, I’m going to eliminate everything that I thought was important, all these cool tips tricks. Tactics, and I’m just going to focus on one thing, and that’s sleep. And then the next thing I focused on was, all right, what do I need to do in the morning to get myself ready? And one of the things that I just do without fail every morning is vitamin D and fish oil. And I actually did an entire podcast about why you should be taking vitamin D, fish oil, and other supplements that you can take that I did with Dr. Edison de Mello of the Akasha Center, so I’ll link to that as well. This isn’t just people in. I do the same thing.
Jeff Greenberg: I do the same thing. I take vitamin D. How much are you taking in the morning? I’m I’m dying tonight.
Zack Arnold: 5000 IE. I’m
Jeff Greenberg: Taking 4000 because the bells come in 2000 increments, and above 5000 therapeutically could be a little dangerous.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. Well, my my physician, Dr. de Mello, is the one that specifically recommended 5000 IU, which is way above the recommended daily allowance, the RDA that everybody’s so aware of. But once you learn how the RDA works and realize that they’re asking for such a small, minimal amount, you talk to somebody like a physician that actually understands the politics behind it. They’ll tell you how much you actually need. And for somebody that works in the conditions that I do or that we all do, where we almost never see the sunlight ever, getting the recommended daily allowance from whatever Centrum pills out there, which is probably all garbage anyway, just doesn’t work. So I have a highly concentrated version that’s 5,000 IU, and every time I do any type of vitamin or mineral analysis from blood tests, my vitamin D is always spot on. And he’s like, “That is so rare in anybody, but especially somebody in your field. So without fail, wake up in the morning, vitamin D, fish oil. I have a few other supplements I take as well, but those are just the the absolute bare bones basics. That essentially, if you’re human in the modern age in American society, you should be taking those when you wake up in the morning. So, I love that you brought that.
Jeff Greenberg: I mean, it’s it’s one of the things. I have a buddy who’s a web designer, and he, you know, sounded really depressed. I’m like, dude, have you ever taken any vitamin D? You’re inside all day long. A week later, he comes back and he says, “You know, it was like a wake-up call. I think that’s the thing that I apologize. Bringing it back to fitness and post, Zack. I’m just thrilled that you do all of this. For me, any small change I can make that can slowly shape me being more healthy is is a good place to be. And just mentally, the way I look at it is, it’s easy to move. To if you’re flying an airplane from here to California, and I’m on the East Coast, if I just can move an inch now, I can be way closer to my target than if I have to move a year from now or an hour from now. I’ve got to fly so many more 1000s of miles. To me, each and every little thing nudges us in the right direction. We can never be our perfect idealized selves, but we can certainly try to move in that direction. And I say it because any direction, any movement, is better than doing nothing.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I think that the psychology of that is so absolutely important, and I think that that’s something that people miss. Where they’re thinking, “Well, you know, I’m not doing all this crazy fitness stuff or diet stuff, but you know, I’m doing all right. I’m staying where I am. And one of the things that I learned that just made such a tremendous difference in my momentum and realizing that I have to, even if it’s just one little tiny thing I have to focus on is that you are either moving forwards or you are moving backwards. You are not staying where you are. You don’t feel yourself moving backwards, but then all of a sudden it’s five years later and you’re like, “Oh my God, how in the world did this happen? It’s because you were moving backwards. But if you’re just picking one small thing, and that’s where you start, you pick one small thing, whether it’s taking a walk, whether it’s eliminating soda from your diet, you just take make one small change. Now you’re moving forwards. You may not be moving forwards at 1000 miles an hour, but you’re starting to move forwards. That’s momentum. You’re working against the inertia that you’ve had for so long, and that one thing leads to another one small thing, which leads to another one small thing, and then like your friend, you’re like, wait. After a week of doing this, I actually feel different. I didn’t even know that I could feel different because I’ve been in the dark so long. I just thought this is the way I was supposed to feel, and then the momentum starts to kick in, and that’s where the change starts to happen. So it’s really about understanding the psychology of it’s either one or the other. You’re never staying the same. It doesn’t work that way.
Jeff Greenberg: I also know that I’m going to trip up sometimes, and I’m not going to punish myself or have shame over it. I’m going to you know do that old adage. I’m going to pick myself up, dust myself off, and and continue back in the direction. I mean, you know, you talked about that inertia. I’ve got 20 years of inertia of behaviors that I’m trying to change, and it just takes time. And the hardest thing is to be patient with ourselves, especially when we have the pull of family and kids and needing to make a paycheck and showing up at work and grinding out the same material. I mean. The The danger we get when we don’t get enough rest, when we do the same thing over and over again, is we get into burnout, and we have to find those things that creatively and emotionally cause us to have some level of of rebirth, of some level of renewal. Otherwise, you know, you end up crashing.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and you crash really, really, really hard. And I know because I’ve been there many, many times. And you can read all about it and my wonderful experiences. And I know that there are a lot of people out there that have been through the same thing. Now, what I want to do is I don’t want to lose the amazing resource that is your brain. So what I want to do is go into some really, really specific stuff that has to do with the conversation we’re already having. But you are a bit of a guru when it comes to apps. You told me that you are basically a serial app collector. It’s my hobby. So as long as we’re on the subject specifically of getting better sleep and you know trying to just maintain new habits, what are some of the apps that you have in your everyday life, either to make you a better editor or to help you sleep better, or the things we’re already talking about, that are something somebody could just jump into right away, and it can be like the vitamin D. We’re like, oh wow, this actually made a difference. Like, what what are some recommendations for people that are not app gurus like you that we don’t want to overwhelm them, but kind of things that really make a difference in your life, where people can start.
Jeff Greenberg: Absolutely. Are we limiting to mobile, or you want to do computers as well?
Zack Arnold: No, just knock it out.
Jeff Greenberg: Okay,
Zack Arnold: Anything.
Jeff Greenberg: So let me start with a couple Mac-specific ones, and then we can go from there. Everything goes into Evernote. My brain’s job is not to be a total vault. I am not Sherlock. I love the show. I do not have a memory palace. I do not have the ability to remember every single interaction I have. Everything goes into Evernote, and now suddenly on every device I own, I have near spot perfect recall. And I put when I tell you, Zack, I put everything into it. I had a roofer come out the other day, and I put that information. And when the roofer comes back and we have a conversation, I’m going to review it before I talk to that roofer, just so I know what we spoke about last. It gives the illusion that my memory is really solid when not out of fatigue, not out of a lack of use. My brain’s job is to be creative, not not to be a perfect mimeograph, a perfect Xerox machine. My brain’s job is to do those wonderful creative things, and it can’t do that if it’s trying to remember the milk every day. So the first one I use is Evernote. I pay for it. They’ve got three levels of it, and that’s on every device I have. I’m never more than a grip, a hand grip away from all the information that I’ve stored in there. I’ve right now got about 1200 notes.
Zack Arnold: Wow! Yeah, I think that offline you may have to share your organizational system in Evernote because anybody that’s listened to the show multiple times know that I just started salivating because you mentioned Evernote, Evernote is one of my favorite tools as well. I don’t put everything in it, but I do put a lot of stuff in it. Between Evernote, Trello, and Google Drive, those basically run essentially my entire workflow, whether it’s work, whether it’s personal, otherwise, as well as OmniFocus. And I actually just released a podcast about how I use some of those tools in a post-production environment, but I think that what I really want to hit on, which is so critical, and it’s really what I’m shaping all of the content that I’m creating for fitness and post and for the courses, is this idea that our brains are not meant to store information, and this was a giant revelation for me because I always made it like a badge of courage. The amount of things that I could remember, and I wouldn’t have to write stuff down, and I kind of prided myself in that. And then I started researching how the brain works, and I realized the brain is not made for remembering things at all. The brain is made for critical thinking, and it’s really what sets us apart from other species in the animal kingdom is our ability to think critically, right?
Zack Arnold: Absolutely. so what I so I started putting all these systems around me, so I don’t have to remember anything. And a really good starting place for somebody that’s not does want to get into specific apps or tips and tools, but they want to understand the concept of this. There’s a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen. It’s called the GTD System. This isn’t all about apps and tips and tricks. It’s all about the theory behind why your brain works the way that it does, and how to reshape the way you think about remembering things and tasks so you don’t use up so much brain energy. Is one thing that I always think about to myself. Everybody’s thinking. The most common question that I get from anybody, whether it’s over email, whether they meet me at a panel, as they say, “How in the world do you do it? Where do you find the energy? Right, and what I’ve realized is that it’s not about finding more energy or finding some magical palace, like you said, that has all this energy for me. It’s that I find ways to conserve the energy that I do have because I’m not. Magical, unique snowflake. I don’t have this amazing amount of energy that is just genetic. It’s because I’ve found so many different ways to conserve what energy I am given, and one of the main ways to do that is to stop trying to remember everything and have a system of organization where, when you have information you need to remember and process, it goes through a workflow. And everybody in this industry understands workflow, but we don’t apply the idea of workflow to our own lives and to our own systems. And that’s what I’m trying to do: is take workflow out of post and put it into health, because that’s an idea that we all get. And Evernote is like the best way to do that.
Jeff Greenberg: You know, you mentioned OmniFocus. I’ve actually met David Allen on two separate occasions.
Zack Arnold: I’m jealous.
Jeff Greenberg: My my book is signed by him, but I’ll go a step further. I actually had their group come out and speak at an editor’s retreat, and we got everybody a copy of the book, and they got a one hour seminar if they wanted to about that whole process. And I think it’s almost too complex. Beyond, it took me about a year to figure it out myself. Zack took me a little over a year to figure out getting things done by myself. And this comes back to our conversation about mentorships. If I had somebody for about 20 minutes, they could have laid out exactly what I should do. OmniFocus is a phenomenal tool for it. I beta tested version zero of it because there was an app design contest, and this is before iOS. This is going back to like maybe oh 304 and I started to design what I wanted as a getting things done app, and it’s totally different than what they do in OmniFocus, but it’s my hub of everything. So, the biggest thing that I think people miss, whether it’s OmniFocus or things or Trello or anything else, is that there needs to be just some level of maintenance. Say a 10-minute review, and in the same sense that in the morning I try and figure out the path of my day. At the end of my day, I try and figure out what’s the emergent thing for tomorrow. So I have something that’s new for you. I have a new new item, Zack. If you’re already down the Evernote, already down the OmniFocus path, there is a guy out there who it’s called the Emergent Task Planner.
Zack Arnold: Hmm, this is new to me,
Jeff Greenberg: Right? And it’s-I’m sure it’s-I’m sure if I could read, if my eyes weren’t beginning to fail me, because it’s at the bottom of this physical printout I made.
Zack Arnold: Wait, physical? You mean like paper? What’s that? How does paper work?
Jeff Greenberg: Yeah, I know. I’ll get you the link for the emergent task planner, but basically what I’m looking at here is three goals for today and a list on the left of what I’m trying to do at any given hour during my day, and on my right is a little section at the bottom of what else is going on. Somebody has something that’s important. I know it’s going to distract from the three things I decided were most important. I’m putting it there as a capture system to see that it exists. And at the end of the day, I’m just going to review that if I can. If not, the first thing I do in the morning is process that sheet. But basically, it’s the idea that you can’t succeed if you don’t have a little bit of a plan in your day, and I’m not talking. I’m I’m talking still stuff that falls inside of David Allen. But if I asked you right now today, what are the three most important things? If you got these three things done, you could relax and goof off, and you would still feel like you had a great day. That’s what this focus is on. It’s a really clever sort of subsystem. It fits in with everything else, and it becomes part of my everyday morning.
Zack Arnold: Right. Well, it’s actually funny that you bring that up because I haven’t heard of the emergent task manager, but I’ve designed my own system that’s exactly what you just described. Literally, it’s like you just crawled into my brain and stole what I’ve been designing, because I have a whole system where I do exactly that. Where I lay out the the things that I’m going to be doing for the day. Like here’s a list of 10 or 15 things that are tasks that I would like to do today. But here’s the must-do list. Here are the three things that I absolutely must have done. Like you said, to be able to feel like I can, you know, go to bed at night knowing that I’ve accomplished what I needed to. Whatever the distractions are, these are the three things. They’re the MITs, the most important. Oh, I love that.
Jeff Greenberg: Here, I’m going to send this in the notes. It’s a guy by the name of Dave Sia, S-E-A-H, and he’s designed these as PDFs that you can download. And I’ve just sent you the the link to it, so that you will make sure that get into the show notes.
Zack Arnold: Yes, absolutely. And the the other thing that I want to point out before we move forwards, and this is going to sound like shameless self promotion because it is, but you had said that it took you about a year to kind of get through the getting things done system and figuring. And how do you apply it to post production and just the world that we live in? That’s exactly what I’m doing right now: is building a system so people have that mentor where you say, “Well, geez, if somebody just sat me down for 20 minutes and showed me how to do this, but in a way that’s practical to my lifestyle and my industry, it would have been so much easier. That’s what I’m doing. That’s exactly what I’m doing right now is saying here all the different things that I’ve learned over a decade, most of which are complete garbage that I’m not going to teach you, but the ones that really are home runs that are bringing me to the next level. I’m just going to share everything. Like I have no secrets. I’m going to share every single thing that works in very easily digestible ways to learn them, so you almost feel like you have that mentor walking you through, so you don’t say, “Well, geez, Evernote and OmniFocus would be great, and I would love to introduce Trello into my life, but I have no idea where to start, and I don’t have the time, so I’m just going to stick with the system I have. I’m trying to prevent that. We have so much less time to get anything done in this industry, and that’s kind of where all this started. Is that in post? It’s no longer these regular days where you know it’s four or five 6o’clock in the afternoon and somebody asks for a dissolve and you’re like well that’s gonna have to go to the lab so we’ll come back tomorrow like that’s those are the stories that I heard from people that worked 2030 years ago we don’t do that anymore we live in front of our workstations and for me my number one goal is how do I conserve as much energy as possible, so I can be creative because I have to work such long hours, and that’s the reason I’m able to get through the day. And I want to provide that mentorship role, which I can’t do in person or can’t do by teaching in a physical class because I don’t have the hours in the day. But by having an online course system, then somebody like you can say, “I don’t have a year. I want to learn it in a week. That’s exactly what I’m building right now.
Jeff Greenberg: It’s fantastic if you’re building it. I’ll tell you with as I went through and put together this, I realized that there are days where I fail with these systems too. You know, and I have to pick myself up and go, nope, it’s time to get back on that horse because the horse works. It gets me there. It’s gotten me there faster. Where the car has got me there faster than any previous car I’ve ever used in my life, or at least keeps me on track to the things that are most important. When I’m overwhelmed, and it’s my favorite thing when I’m lost, is I do a mind dump. I open up a Evernote doc and I just write everything out of my head, and usually at about 10 minutes, it’s all out of my head, and I can review it and look and say what is really important in this list and what’s not. And some days it scares the hell out of me because everything’s important.
Zack Arnold: Yep, been there too. I know what that feels like. You’re like, oh, I’ll do the mind dump, but you’re like, oh, I don’t know, I’m gonna do all this. Let me
Jeff Greenberg: Let me drill down even further because if you look at this so far, I’ve said here’s memory, here’s we both have mentioned OmniFocus, which is an overall system. I’ve talked about this emergent task planner, which is my daily. But from moment to moment, I think in usually I think in 25 minute to two hour periods, one of the hardest things for me to deal with are the producer level, the manager level people who live on email all day long, think in five to 15-minute gaps. They go, “Oh, I got 10 minutes. Let me make a phone call. I’m trying to avoid every human being on this planet while I’m working. While I’m working that cherished sacred time, and those interruptions destroy my ability to move forward. So I use a Pomodoro app. I don’t care which one, but just something that says 25 minutes. And you don’t even need an app. You can say to Siri or to to on your Android device, you can say set a countdown for 25 minutes, and you don’t do anything other than that one thing.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and this is another area where I have entire units that will be on this and how to manage this, and I could talk about this for an entire show. But I do exactly the same thing. My app of choice is called Focus Time because Focus Time not only has the timer, but you can modify the amount of time. You can modify the break time, but it also keeps track of all your Pomodoros through the day, so you can actually set a goal and you can see your history over time. And I think that that quantification, if you want to go to that level, can be motivational. Doesn’t it also
Jeff Greenberg: Doesn’t it also send to idoneth.com?
Zack Arnold: Not as far as I know. Maybe it does, and I’m just not aware of that feature. Hold on a second.
Jeff Greenberg: Hold on just a moment. I’m looking to see because I have I I want to see if it’s the same app I have. No, I have one called Focus Bar.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, Focus Time is one of the the more popular ones, and I went through at least I would say I tested at least 10 Pomodoro apps just to make sure that it fit my exactly what it was that I was looking for, and even focus time is not perfect, but it’s gotten as close as I can get. But that’s one that I really really like for the quantification aspect. But the other one that I really really recommend for people that just say, “Oh, there’s just no way that I can stick to this, and the most common thing I’ll hear is, “Oh, but when I when. Get in the zone. I just don’t want to get out of the zone. I just want to stay there, right? And the first thing I’ll say to that is that yes, getting in the zone is great, and that’s why the Pomodoro method is so useful. But your brain physically cannot handle being in a highly focused mode for more than about 50 minutes to an hour. And if you continue to go past that point, that’s when you start to hit the point of exhaustion, where you may not think you’re exhausted, but then all of a sudden at nine or 10 o’clock at night, you’re like, “Oh my God, I can barely move.
Jeff Greenberg: It gets shorter as the day progresses. Exactly. So you actually get less done, less focus time, less you know zone time over the course of 10 or 12 hours because you refuse to take yourself out of the zone, so the tool that I use to basically be my policeman to say no, you get away from your computer is something called break time. And break time is, I believe it’s like five bucks, but you can get a demo mode that works for I think for like a month or something. But break time will literally render your computer useless when it hits your time. Interesting. The the kicker there is I have that same thing. It’s called Sophie. It’s my daughter. She comes home at about 530 and it doesn’t make a difference what I wanted to do. Yeah, Sophie is gonna put the kibosh. She’s gonna stop me from doing anything further. I’m a morning person because the kid shows up. My wonderful daughter shows up five 530 and whatever my plans were, if they’re not done by then, they’re not going to get done. Because at 9o’clock the next moment that I get to myself, I’m going to be done. I’m not going to have the energy because I’ve been up since five this morning, and I’m now suddenly a morning person, whether or not I like it.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. And I think that that’s that’s a really important thing for people to understand is that when you set a specific deadline for something, you will get your task done in that amount of time. Whereas if you say, “Well, I’ve got all day to cut this two-minute scene, it’s not going to take me that long. Guess what? It’s going to take you all day to cut that two-minute scene. But if you say to yourself, “Well, you know what? I’m going to do this in two pomodoros, and mine are 50 minutes apiece. I don’t do 25. There’s actually a lot of research out there that points out that the the magic number is 52 on and 17 off. So I do 50 on and 15 off. But if you say to yourself, I have the scene and I need to get it done in two pomodoros, you will get it done, and most likely it’s going to be just as good, or maybe even better than it would have been if you had kind of toolled around and taken all day and checked your email and done social media. Are
Jeff Greenberg: You familiar with Parkinson’s law? Literally, that was going to be my next work. Expands to fill the time available. If you have two minute, if you have like the thing that blows my mind as a teacher, I’ve I’ve worked with pretty much in this country every single news editorial group. That’s NBC, CBS, ABC, 60 Minutes, CNN, ESPN, and the guys that blow my mind are the guys who do news, who do fast turnaround news. Zack, I met a guy who could cut a minute and a half, two-minute spot in less than 30 minutes. If this one producer, this one producer would abuse him in a sense. Any producer is supposed to come down and give these editors two hours, but if she knew this one guy was working, she would show up with less than 30 minutes, and he would have to cut it together and still make it to air. If he could do that in 30 minutes, there’s no reason why we can’t, you know, structure our cutting smarter and faster. We may not like it, we may not want to, but at least getting something cut, getting something to that completed state, is what’s important because there’s another scene after that, and another scene after that, and another scene after that.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, they just keep coming. I mean, if you’re in television or in news, it’s the sausage just never stops needing to get made. There’s just more sausage and more sausage and more sausage, and you need to have a system where you don’t let yourself just arbitrarily, quote unquote, get into the zone because you may think, “Oh yeah, I’m getting into the zone and the scene is great and blah blah blah. And then, “Wow, it’s been four hours. But if you had harshened out your time and said, “Well, I’m going to totally be in the zone, but I need to get X amount of scenes done, or if you’re cutting a trailer, I need to get 30 seconds of my trailer done in you know this period of time based on Parkinson’s law, and I’ll put a link to what that actually is. You will be able to get it done in the allotted period of time, and most likely it’s going to be just as good or better. But you didn’t waste all that time. But it’s about finding the systems to make sure that you’ve eliminated the other distractions. Certainly, email is the biggest distraction on the planet, but I think that social media is probably becoming just as big or even bigger, where people are constantly living by the the rat pellet of the notifications.
Jeff Greenberg: Oh, oh my God! Let’s let’s go down those holes. Give me one second. I just want to mention. For me, it was like one of those revelatory moments, a revelatory. I call them ear bleeding moments when I first. Learned Avid’s Top and Tales when I first learned Replace Edit and Media Composer, those were ear bleeding moments. I can remember my life before and after those moments. One of those moments also for me was Hemingway, Hemingway, who during the Spanish American War would crank out an article every single day, and for most of his life he cranked out, you know, more and more. I just think, for the moment, as I was listening to you talk, the editor who’s out there who goes, “Well, I need the amount of time that I need, and I need to be a, you know, think. And my argument is, no, you need to be able to crank, crank, crank, and at least as a storyteller, be a machine in the respect that every day you want to show up, because when when actual inspiration shows up, you will be a honed craftsman ready to go, versus somebody who can only be creative when the moments are right. And I think that’s very much the difference between a professional and a dabbler is the professional meets deadlines and can continue to crank out regardless of what’s going on in their lives. And that’s to me what storytelling and art is about: is being that craftsman, is having those craft skills.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that kind of goes back to the idea that I was mentioning of just budgeting your energy and conserving energy. So when that moment does strike, like if working on Empire, if all of a sudden I had a day where I was given seven hours of dailies for one music number, and I said, you know what, guys, I’m just not in the zone today. I’m sorry. Like I just I can’t do a good job. I’m not going to be able to do this. And you know, it hits me at 2o’clock in the morning. So I’m just going to have to wait until that happens. Guess what would happen? They’re going to fire me and get somebody else that can do it. But what I’ve done is developed a way to turn on the switch. So if I don’t need the intense focus and I don’t need the energy to be working on a really intense scene, I will just kind of go through the motions and I’ll do a 50-minute pomodoro and say, you know what? It’s 3o’clock in the afternoon. I’m kind of low energy. Let me just pick something that I know that I could kind of cut in my sleep. Two people sitting at a table talking about what they’re going to do tomorrow, right? I don’t need a ton of energy to do that. I don’t need to be in the zone, but the reason I do that is I’m budgeting my energy, no different than budgeting your money, right? You’re saving your money and not spending frivolously because you want to be able to go on a trip in six months. This is the same thing. When I have that day where all of a sudden I’m handed seven hours of dailies and I need to turn those around and cut a six minute music number in one day, I turn the switch on. Everything else goes away. I have the systems in place to get into that intense focus, and I can knock it out. And then people are like, “Wait a second! How in the world did this get turned around so fast? It’s because I budgeted my time and my energy, so now when I need it the most, I turn on the switch. It’s there, and I can get through stuff given the amount of time that I have. But you have to develop those systems. You can’t, like you said, just say, “Well, I have to wait until I get into the moment. That’s great if you’re just somebody creative that does this on your own time. But when you’re being paid to do it by a studio, buy a production company, whoever it is. They don’t care about your moment. They just don’t care. They just want the work done, and they want it done at a high level. And if you want to be better at what you do and be more hireable and make more money, these are the kinds of things that nobody is focusing on. They’re all thinking, “Well, I need to be good at Avid or I need to have a great reel. And like, like yes, you need to be good at Avid or be good at Premiere, Final Cut, whatever your tool of choice is. Which, like you said, I don’t care what it is. An editor is an editor. It’s about storytelling. But just thinking that’s all you need on your resume, or those are the only skills you need to be good at what you do. You’re just doing a tremendous amount of disservice to your future.
Jeff Greenberg: Well, you know what the funny thing is, is they’ll figure out what a disservice it is when they’re ready to hear that lesson. When I meet people who say, “Oh, I’m absolutely a night person. I’ve been a night person all my life. I was that guy. And you know, when the student is ready, the teacher will arrive. When you know you lead a horse to water, you can’t make him drink, and that was that lesson for me. Was literally, you can’t force people to hear until they’re ready to hear. So, along those lines, let’s talk about the email, web, social media black holes of our lives.
Zack Arnold: Oh, shall we? This is my favorite topic of conversation because I just so disdain email and social media as something to consume. I obviously am a social media whore, so I’m contributing to the problem because I’m sending so much information out with trying to you know teach people this or that or whatever it is. But as far as consuming it, I stay away from it as much as humanly possible.
Jeff Greenberg: The The thing is, is that for people who don’t know you directly, that’s the only way that they’re going to get to know you is through the Facebook group, is through Twitter. the The thing that’s a struggle with me with all this is it’s another new information information stream breaking up, you know, my existing day. And I know people who love this stuff, hate this stuff. I take the same approach. I do to all the editorial software, which is it makes no difference whether or not I think it’s great or terrible. It’s a fact of life that Twitter exists, a fact of life that Facebook exists. I’m trying to use it as intelligently and as carefully as I can. I don’t want my life to be consumed by it nor email, so I try not to tech email till at least 10 o’clock in the morning, which it is right now. But realistically, I’m going to try not to look at it till 1p.m and it’s hard. And something that has helped recently, I’ve always had off the the push notification on my phone, but I picked up an app called Spark. It’s a free email software, and I put my major, my four major emails into it, and it seems to be pretty intelligent about only displaying something when it’s important. And I’m not actively checking it when I go to take a break in between those pomodoros. I’ll just flip down the the notification manager on my iPhone, and I’ll just take a look to see if there’s anything in there, and then I move on. All I’m looking for, all I’m looking for, are emergencies. If I’m having a gut reaction, like I’m angry about an email, I’m not going to answer it. I’m going to make it at least wait for a couple hours, but email’s goal is not to be an instantaneous response. If somebody wants an instant response from me and they have my my phone number, they’re supposed to text me. If they don’t have my phone number, they’re not supposed to ever have my phone number. my My goal is for email to be under my control, and that means I’m checking it once or twice a day, and the first time on an early day is 10 o’clock, and on a late day it’s 1o’clock
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that that’s one of the hardest things for people to realize, where they say to themselves, “Well, I can’t do that. I’m important. I need to be able to respond. The number one productivity killer on the planet is email, and the best thing I’ve ever been told about email is from a guy named Brendan Burchard, who’s a like a high performance coach, and you know, kind of does a similar work to like Tony Robbins. He works with Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and all these huge CEOs, and he calls email a convenient organizing system for other people’s agendas. So if your plan is to get things done, then email is not going to be the way to do it. But
Jeff Greenberg: You know the thing that makes email work is that it feels like you’re accomplishing a goal. Look, I had 30 in my inbox, and now I have none. So what I do when I open up my email is I’m ruthless. I’m subscribing to inbox zero. I’m immediately getting through all the email. Anything that’s going to take less than two minutes getting things done. I’m just going to quickly respond. Everything else is going to be tabled till I’m done to the bottom of the list, and I can give attention to the four or five or 10 or however many emails I’ve got to deal with. But it’s just that idea that when I’m going through email, that I’m not going to do that instant reply, even if it’s urgent. I got to get to the bottom of it to make sure I saw all the urgent things because the thing that’s critical right now might not be as critical when I look for down. One great free utility I found out there is a website called Unroll.me.
Zack Arnold: Oh yeah, actually, I gave this away as one of my tips of the week and one of my earlier newsletters. I love Unroll Me, love it.
Jeff Greenberg: So what it does is you got to give it your credentials, but it pulls out of your inbox all of the. You know what I got? I call it bacon. It’s not spam. It’s bacon. Bacon. B A C N is spam that I want.
Zack Arnold: Ooh, I love that. I’m stealing that.
Jeff Greenberg: You should. I stole it from somebody else. I’m sure. I wish I was that clever, but it’s just that idea that okay, I got four. I have on one one of the accounts I have. I have something like 100 or 200 different subscriptions, and they never hit my mail email box. When I’ve got a couple minutes, I’ll just quickly glance to see if there’s anything today that I feel like reading about, and I feel like I have the time to read about. It gets it mostly out of my email box, and that keeps me happy because it makes my email box what it should be-a communication tool when I do use it.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s unroll.me, and basically you get one email a day, and in that email a day, it will show you all the newsletters you get. You’re not losing any of them; they’re not disappearing. It’s just making sure that every three minutes, you don’t get the little rabbit pellet ding to say, “Ooh, what’s that? Is that important? Oh, it’s a newsletter. Ooh, what’s that? Right. So it’s eliminating that.
Jeff Greenberg: No, no rabbit pellets. Yeah,
Zack Arnold: Exactly. None of the pellets. The mindset or the kind of the analogy that I want people to start thinking about with email because I know that changing email culture is a it’s a slow moving ship, and it’s going to take time. But once you do it, it’s a life changer. But the thing that really kind of clicked for me is everybody thinks that emails is something that has to be taken care of immediately, and I. I want you to flip your perspective, and I want you to think about email like you think about your laundry, right? Nobody ever says, “Ooh, this shirt just got dirty. I’m going to put it in the washer, and I’m going to wash it, and I’m going to put it in the dryer, and I dry it. Right? That would be stupid. That’s not efficient. You make a collection of your dirty laundry, and all at once you batch process it, where you go through and you say I’m going to put everything in the washing machine at once. I’m going to put everything in the dryer, and there I’ve done my laundry, and it takes me an hour a week, right? But you don’t say, “All right, well now I just have the sock. I have to go wash the sock, right? Oh wait, now now I just the shirt’s a little bit sweaty. I’m going to go wash this. That would be insanity. So is doing that with email. So think about your inbox as your laundry basket. That change for me was like, oh my god, that makes such a big difference.
Jeff Greenberg: I, I only have I can only echo that. You know, it’s one of the hardest things. the The only you know running joke is I was listening to you say that. I was thinking, well, the sad part is I got a couple pieces of clothing. I got a couple pieces of email that have been sitting there long enough that they start to stink.
Zack Arnold: I love that. That’s great. And
Jeff Greenberg: It’s it’s truthfully speaking, I was going through my email of things I want to do to address, and I looked at the one from you from yours. I which by the way, july 19. So it’s taken me since july 19 to reply to you, which I did late late last week, but I literally was going through, and I’m like, “Yep, I want to go ahead and do Zack’s podcast. And I would go and look online, and you your days, the times that you, for those of you who don’t know Zack, when he goes to interview somebody, he says, “You don’t even have to negotiate. Here are my availability times online. You click the ones you want, and we’re good. I did that, and I almost didn’t do it because the first time I looked, I saw 9o’clock my time. I did the math. I knew it was six a.m. your time. I felt tremendously guilty. I’m I’m I’m so thrilled you have this energy level at six a.m. to be on on Skype with me like this sack,
Zack Arnold: And like I said, this is coming from somebody that was never a morning person, and I was a miserable, miserable, miserable human being until 10 a.m. until probably two years ago, and then I said, “Enough is enough. I got to be there for my kids. I want to give my son a hug in the morning. And I just sat down and figured out how do I do this. And here we go. It’s you know 7o’clock in the morning now, but I was up at 530 Felt great. Got what I needed to get. Got on Skype. So there’s no reason to feel guilty because this is when I’m doing other stuff anyway. The only difference is that obviously my morning routine is a little bit different, and I had to sacrifice a few things that I do every morning to fit in this hour. But that’s by choice because I cut on average 60 hours a week, and there’s not a whole lot of time to record shows. And I used to just be completely frantic about, oh my god, how am I going to find time to record a show with somebody? And that, oh well, they’re they’re available at 2o’clock in the afternoon, but I can’t do 2o’clock today. So maybe it’s 10 a.m. tomorrow. Like I was pulling my hair out, and I said, enough is enough. I have to figure out a system. I can’t afford a personal assistant. I can’t afford a receptionist. But now I just have this nice little program where, and and I it’s called YouCanBook.me. There are other ones out there as well. This is the one that I like. But you just say here’s a block of time that I’m available. You just put it on your calendar, so it’s just in my Apple calendar where I just write out the blocks of time that I’m available and I want to be available, and anybody can pick any time, whether it’s to have a conference call, whatever it is. I don’t use it with my mom, but I use it with just about anybody else, and say, and they’re like, “Oh, hey, I would love to talk. Like, great, here’s a link. You pick a time that you want to chat because there’s nothing that drives me more nuts than I’m in the middle of working on something and I get a phone call. It’s like, but my mindset right now is not to have that phone call, and if I pick up the phone, that means that you are somebody that’s really, really important in my life because I will screen almost all of my calls because I don’t want to break that train of thought. So somebody’s listening, saying, “Oh, he always picks up my calls. That’s because I really, really like you, and you’re very important to me. So that’s my mother, my wife, and maybe three other people that I work with that are close colleagues. Other than that, it goes in the scheduler because it doesn’t fit into my agenda for the day, and it doesn’t mean that I’m more important than you are, and my time is more important. It just means that I’m protecting my blocks of time and saying, if you really want me to focus on you and make you the most important thing in my life at that time, let’s just schedule it, and then you’re going to get that. I’m not going to be distracted. I’m not going to feel like I have to be doing something else. When you have me on the phone, you have me 100% totally focused. But if you call me and it’s not scheduled, guess what? I’m going to be distracted, and I might not even remember our conversation. So it actually provides more benefit to the person that you’re speaking to, and not just yourself.
Jeff Greenberg: So I’m I’m terrifically curious. What’s your right now? Your biggest struggle, the thing that you, because I’ll tell you what mine is. I’m an avid user of Reddit. I actually am the mod of editors and video editing over on Reddit, and it’s a black. It becomes somewhat of a black hole. It’s. Community I’m invested in. I’m also invested in the you know four different Facebook communities. I try to say, okay, I’m only going to look at this stuff 30 minutes a day. But the communities that I’m involved with, like the editors retreat on Facebook, are those communities that I’m I’m taking an active role, which usually means I need to check in with them at least once a day, and sometimes more. The best I’m able to do is go. Okay, my downtime during Pomodoro-that’s my chance to look at that stuff. But I’m just curious, Zack. What what are you struggling with on the productivity side? You know, is it the web? Is it social? What
Zack Arnold: On the productivity side, I feel like for the most part, I’ve managed most of that stuff at this point. I was drowning for the last year and a half trying to figure out how to manage the social media that had to do with fitness and post, that had to do with my documentary film. But I discovered a site called Meet Edgar, which completely changed my life in social media. Where now I have social media going out all the time, all day long, and I have no idea what’s going out, but it’s exactly it’s what I want when I want
Jeff Greenberg: It. Meet Edgar.
Zack Arnold: Meet Edgar. It’s not cheap. It’s really more for you know small businesses or even enterprises, but it’s not like Hootsuite where it’s five bucks a month. It is
Jeff Greenberg: How’s it how is it compared to Hootsuite?
Zack Arnold: It’s totally different. I’ve I dumped Hootsuite about six months ago because Hootsuite just was not working well enough for me. But it really it works if you have a lot of content that you want to schedule on a regular basis. If you’re just somebody that will you know like just say oh I want to post this or I want to share my feelings, it’s it’s not going to work so much if you’re somebody that shares information kind of on the spot on the moment. But for me, I’m sharing so much content that’s evergreen. Whether it’s an article on here’s seven ways to do push-ups in your office, or here are the 10 foods that you shouldn’t eat, whatever it is, stuff like that. I have those going out on a regular schedule. I’m promoting the program’s contests on a regular schedule. When it comes to my documentary, I have memes, and I’m showing trailers and sample scenes, and it’s all going on on a regular schedule. But I don’t have to schedule it, and that was the worst thing with Hootsuite is that it’s you. Yes, you can schedule things in advance, and you have this great calendar in front of you, but you always still have to do it. And the way that Edgar works, and I know that this may now be you know going onto the realm of things where people are like I edit, and I don’t care about social media management. But if you do, it’s immensely helpful. Is that all? You do is you create categories of posts. You create these libraries. So I would say here are 100 articles that I want to share about health and wellness for fitness and post. So I have this collection. It’s this queue, but then I just put on a calendar every Friday at 2p.m. share one of these articles, right? So it’s just pulling out of the pile. But once it’s done, it recycles the content. So I never have an empty post at whatever block of time I want to post. So I’ve been doing social media two or three times a day for my documentary film since May. I haven’t posted anything once, and it’s September.
Jeff Greenberg: That’s that’s fantastic. I just brought up the site. It looks really, it it doesn’t look cheap, but if you know social media is part of the forefront of what you do, and you know it scarily whether it’s Facebook, yeah, whatever show you’re working on, whatever project you’re working on, is going to have some sort of posting to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, no matter what. Those are the least that it’s going to happen with with any professional project we work in now. Whether or not we’re that person for your film, I bet you you’re that person.
Zack Arnold: Oh, I absolutely am that person, and I manage Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube on a regular basis, and just trying to keep all of them straight forever was the bane of my existence. And social media drove me crazy. And then I discovered Meet Edgar, and it was like the sky’s open. But if you’re somebody that’s more just the the type of person that’s like, oh, I want to you know do a a random post about you know the fact that I just had this problem in my NLE, or maybe I post every Saturday this thing or that thing. I would definitely recommend Hootsuite to a lot of people that just want to manage their feeds and manage the information coming into them so they can sort it. I think the worst thing you can do is just have 10 tabs open for this Facebook group and that Facebook group and this Twitter feed and that Twitter feed. Like Hootsuite does it for you, and it’s like five bucks a month. So in that sense, I like it.
Jeff Greenberg: Hootsuite’s free.
Zack Arnold: Oh, it is free.
Jeff Greenberg: Hootsuite’s got oh, there’s there’s your little one. Yep,
Zack Arnold: There’s my alarm. My I told you my alarm was going to go off eventually, and my my alarm that I call Evelyn just went off. You called yours, Sophia. I call mine Evelyn. All right. Well, my three year old daughter just asked me to read her a story, and I I can’t say no. So we’re this will be a little bit of an abrupt transition, but we’re we’re gonna have to go ahead and we’ll we’ll cut this off for now. But I think that we’ve we can cut
Jeff Greenberg: This off. We can also you know anytime you want, we can pick up on it with a part two.
Zack Arnold: Oh yeah, I would love to do a part two and a part three and a part four, and I think. We’ve we’ve definitely jumped into an area where a lot of people probably aren’t thinking about this stuff, but it’s tremendously useful for people in our industry. So yeah, I definitely definitely want to dig deeper, and we can set up a part two, and I can send you the scheduler, and we can do it all over again. But that sounds I
Jeff Greenberg: Will do it so much faster now that I know that you’re you’re sane and easy in the morning, and yes,
Zack Arnold: I love it.
Jeff Greenberg: Yeah, go ahead. So let’s wrap. All
Zack Arnold: Right. Well, thank you so much for for being here today, Jeff. If I want to send people somewhere where they can learn more about you, they can learn about Editors Retreat. They want to learn where they can see what conferences. What’s the best place to send them?
Jeff Greenberg: The best place to probably go is j Greenberg consulting.com And just while we’re doing it, let me just run through my quick list. I’m Film Geek on Twitter. If you ever want to know what the next conference is, I’ll tell you there. But upcoming, I’ve got Adobe Max a week from yesterday in LA. Zack, if you have any time for you over the weekend, maybe we’ll see if we can get together. There’s, of course, the editors’ retreat, and then there’s Adobe Video World coming up later this year. So those are three conferences that I’ll be speaking up between now and the end of the year. Adobe Video World’s in San Jose. It’s going to be Premiere Pro and After Effects centric, and the editors retreat is going to be in February in Albuquerque. And when I get more details about who our keynotes are, I’m going to let you know, Zack. But as always, if you want to come and show us a little bit of Empire, we would love to see it.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I definitely want to want to get myself on that list, and I really wanted to go to the Adobe conference. It’s just it came in the worst part of my schedule, so there’s just no way that I was going to be able to go, but yes, I’m. I’m trying to find as many opportunities as possible to to share information and just you know get any anything out there that’s going to help people be better at what they do. So
Jeff Greenberg: Keep the faith, brother. I love that.
Zack Arnold: I will. Thank you so much for your time, Jeff. I appreciate it.
Jeff Greenberg: Totally my pleasure, Zack. And of course, let’s do it again.
Zack Arnold: All right. Take it easy.
Jeff Greenberg: Talk to you later. Bye bye.
