Let's create things that matter. Together.
In this episode Zack and Natalie answer questions submitted by listeners just like you:
• Learn how we use Trello in our scripted television post workflow
• Learn what the most effective time blocking method is to stay productive while still maintaining your creative energy
• Learn how to approach your supervisor for a height-adjustable workstation
• Learn how to deal with people in your office that don’t understand (or agree with) you wanting to take quick exercise and walking breaks at work
• Learn additional strategies for getting more done during the day
See below for additional topics of conversation.
Click here to submit your podcast question for a future Q&A episode
If your question is read on the show you will win a Fitness In Post t-shirt and a blender bottle! And we will pick one random winner from all the questions chosen and that person will win a month’s supply of Athletic Greens, my favorite greens supplement that I use every morning.
Zack Arnold: I’m here today with my partner in crime, none other than Natalie Boschan. How are you, Natalie?
Natalie Boschan: I’m good.
Zack Arnold: It’s been a long time. It has been at least 90 minutes since we spoke last.
Natalie Boschan: I know, and we were only at work for 11 hours.
Zack Arnold: Well, the funny thing is that you and I have been trying to record this thing together for like two weeks, and I had my audio recording equipment at work, just trying to steal 45 minutes where we could get away, record a Q and A podcast, and it never happened. So we’re like, screw it, we’re just gonna do it at 9o’clock at night, and here we are.
Natalie Boschan: That’s okay. Now I get to drink one glass of wine while we do this.
Zack Arnold: Yes, and we’ll, of course, sensor that out, because this is a clean podcast, so this
Natalie Boschan: Is a clean podcast. I didn’t say my F word glass of wine, I said just my glasses
Zack Arnold: Anyway. Without further ado, I say we just go ahead and we jump right into these questions. I frankly have done just about zero preparation whatsoever, because we have spent so much freaking time in the edit bay on this new job that I just, we collected the best questions in like 15 minutes during a lunch break, and here we are. So, we’re just gonna, we’re just gonna free form. This is gonna be the jazz of podcast Q and A.
Natalie Boschan: I think the first one is for you. I mean, they’re all addressed to you, but this one, this one, you’ll be able to answer pretty well. So, from Nicole C, what kind of break schedule do you find to be the most effective for both health and productivity? Parentheses, every hour, every 20 minutes, should I take short walks or do bursts of exercise?
Zack Arnold: Yeah, so this could end up being a two-part podcast Q&A, and we don’t even get to the rest of the questions, because Natalie’s already rolling her eyes, going, “Oh my god, this is all he ever talks about all day, every day. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah,
Zack Arnold: So yes, this is a, this is a topic near and dear to my heart that I’m very, very passionate about, and that is getting rid of this notion that in order to be productive, we have to put our heads down, we have to hunker down in front of our computers for 810, 12 hours a day and never move. This is basically the crux and the foundation of my entire program is trying to teach people how not to do that, because it absolutely kills your productivity. So, I could go down this rabbit hole for hours, and anybody that’s listened to previous shows knows that rabbit hole can be a nice drinking game, and I was just gonna say Natalie’s got wine, so not only knows how well that’s gonna work, but
Natalie Boschan: What happens at question five?
Zack Arnold: But yeah, no kidding, right? If we even get that far, you’re gonna be like, question five, what is editing? Oh, that’s not the question, anyway. So I’ve done a lot of research on this topic. Am I an expert? No, but this is something that I am very passionate about. I’ve done a lot of reading, done a lot of research, and I’ve actually built an entire module in the Optimize Yourself course that’s all about learning how to maximize your attention, maximize your focus, and also learn the process of time blocking your day. So, to answer her specific question, What kind of break schedule do you find to be the most effective for health and productivity? I personally stand by the amount of about 50 minutes working, and then I do 10 or 15 minute breaks. And there was actually a study done recently, and there’s an article about it in the Atlantic magazine. It’s an article that I actually cite and talk about in depth in my Optimize Yourself course, and we’ll put a link to it in the show notes, but they did study this exact concept, and they found that the magic number for optimal focus, health, energy, creativity, everything was 52 minutes on and 17 minutes off. So basically, what that’s saying is that if you are working for more than an hour at a time without moving, if you think, oh yeah, well, I just.. I have to get the work done, and I have to get it perfect, and I can’t stand up for 234, hours until I have this done. You’re doing yourself a tremendous disservice by not giving your brain a break, so that’s kind of the magic number. And I know this is something that you and I talked about in our last podcast together, where you’re talking about your marathons, so you’ve seen tremendous benefit in doing time blocking as well.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, what I found is that, well, what I try to do with my work, basically, is if I can plan out when I’m going to do outputs or when I’m going to be bringing in media, and I’ve got to wait for my databases to scan, or I’ve got to render something like that, I actually try to plan those renders and outputs if I can. If there’s not an immediate, you know, emergency or somebody needs something right away, I try to plan around my break times, so that I’ve found has been pretty effective for me. I also, since I am marathon training again, I have started – I’ve started doing 10 minute workout breaks, because I don’t have enough time in the morning to get in strength training, and because our office is pretty awesome and has a whole little mini gym, thanks to Zack and our producer, and just everybody who’s brought in their own little exercise equipment, so I actually take 10 minute exercise breaks, about two or three of them a day, to try to get in all of my strength training, because I can’t. It all in in the morning, so that’s how I’ve been strategic about my breaks.
Zack Arnold: Yes, and that’s a true story. Because I’ll be walking around saying, “Where the hell is Natalie? And they’re like, “Oh, she’s carving her abs right now. Like, wait, what? Oh, the ab car. Oh, I get it now. I get it. Yeah,
Natalie Boschan: I know. It’s like, oh, but it’s ab day, that’s why.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah,
Natalie Boschan: It’s Corday,
Zack Arnold: And everybody knows the sound now at about four 430 every day, where it’s just that’s Zack jump roping like, what the hell is that sound? It’s just it’s kind of become that thing, but what I tell people in my course is that you cannot, if you’re somebody that spends all day checking Facebook, checking Twitter, whenever your email dings, you check it, like if you’re all about your notifications, if every five minutes you do three edits, and then you’re like, “Oh, I need a break, and you go to CNN, and you read a news feed, and you read Huffington Post, whatever it is, that’s not time blocking, that is allowing yourself to be in the same position physically in front of your computer, but multitasking on so many different things, that’s not time blocking. The core fundamental of time blocking is you’re doing one task at a time, because science has definitively proven the human brain cannot multitask. We can switch from one task to another very quickly, but every time you multitask and try to do multiple things at once, your productivity score drops by like 40% And this is not somebody’s opinion, this is science.
Natalie Boschan: And when you’re doing nuanced work, like what I do for assistant editing, and sending things to vendors, and getting stuff back, and making sure it’s all in and properly lined up. I mean, you really notice that once you know if you try to keep switching tasks from bringing in VFX versus sending out a cut versus anything else that you have to do, it starts to become your brain starts to just shut down at some point, you just can’t, you just can’t do all of those things at one time, so you have to focus on what, like, right now I am going to bring in my visual effects, then I will cut them in, then I will send out an output, like it has to be like that, or else that you just drive yourself insane,
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and one other thing that I want to really emphasize, and then I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent here, and then go back to kind of the time blocks themselves, and the amount of time, and how to get started, but one thing that people need to realize, and this is something I had to realize myself, so this is kind of coming from a place of experience, is that if you say, oh, well, I just, I, you know, I’m just so add, like I’m just distracted all the time, and that’s just not for me. Well, number one, that’s everybody now. I mean, science has shown that we have a shorter attention span than goldfish, thanks to all of our technology, but the brain is capable of changing. So, if you’re thinking, “Well, I’m really out of shape, I could never get in shape or grow muscle, well, we all know that that’s true. We all know that if you did actually go to the gym and lifted weights and ate properly, that you can gain weight or lose weight, and you can build muscle tone, like that’s just accepted information in our society, but people don’t realize the brain is the same way. The brain has something called neuroplasticity, which means it can grow new neurons, and it can grow, but you have to teach it to do that, no different than trying to do bicep curl. So, if you want to start time blocking, you can’t just say, well, I haven’t run for five years, so I’m going to start running 10 miles a day tomorrow and get ready for a marathon. You’re going to be miserable, so don’t say, “Well, 5217 is the optimal amount, and I’m going to do it. Like, no, start with five minutes, start with 10, but set a timer, see how long you can do it, and if you feel comfortable, keep going. For me, anything more than 20 minutes when I first started was torture, and now I don’t even need the timers anymore. It’s just some.. it’s just the way that my brain works, where I just inherently feel the sense of, all right, I need to be focusing now, and I work, and I think I just told you this today. I just.. I’ll notice that after 50 to 60 minutes, if I’m not paying attention, my brain starts to stray and it starts to wander off, and I’ll look at my timer. I’m like, oh, look, I just hit the 54 minute mark. No wonder why I can’t focus. I’ll walk away for five or 10 minutes, I’ll grab water, I’ll walk around the block, I’ll walk up and down the steps of our building and get locked out, and you’ll have to let me in. And then
Natalie Boschan: I get a break, which
Zack Arnold: Is a true story that’s happened to me twice in our new building. On a side note, we moved to a new building, I don’t know, like two months ago, and we’re now, and I don’t know if I’d use the word skyscraper, but it’s like a 30 story building, and we’re on floor 19, and I’m like, well, of course, I need to try taking the stairs, and I do, but I just didn’t realize the first few times I did it that I couldn’t keep the door propped open, and I kept getting locked in the stairwell, thank God for phones and text messages, and I’m just sheepishly in the stairwell, like, God damn it. Yeah, I have to text Natalie again that I’m stuck in the stairwell, and she’s gonna give me
Natalie Boschan: Her producer. Her producer’s like, “Where’s Zack? I’m like, “I don’t know, I haven’t seen him. Bling bling, text message, “I’m locked in the stairwell, can you come get me?
Zack Arnold: Yep, that’s a true story.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, Janice, I found Zack, he’s in the stairwell, go get ’em,
Zack Arnold: So anyway, that is a very, very long and embarrassing road to get to the answer that the amount of time that you need to focus is largely dependent on you and what you’re capable of. Take it slowly, start small, slowly build up to it, but once you hit the point of about 50 minutes to an hour that. That’s where you’re going to maximize your productivity and your energy and not burn yourself out, because you are capable of doing crazy focused work for three to four hours at a time, but then as soon as you’re out of it, you’re done and you’re burned out for the rest of the day and maybe days afterwards. So we’re talking about, we’re looking at long term, we’re playing chess and not checkers, so if you want to be able to do it day after day after day after day, and be productive, stay somewhere in the 50 minutes to an hour range, and then walk away. Now we’re going to move on to the second question. I’m going to read this one to you. I think we both have good answers to this, but yours are way better than mine. So the second question is from Sarah F. What do you say to your bosses or your higher ups when they catch you in mid exercise or mid walk for health reasons.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I’ve been caught multiple times mid exercise, which is really embarrassing if you’re like doing like sit-ups or like exercises, just aren’t they’re not pretty, like you are always in compromising positions. But I got, I think the first one, I’m very fidgety, I’m small and I’m fidgety, and so when I’m standing and talking to a group of people, I’ll just start stretching, and there’s that one stretch, it’s kind of like a yoga stretch, where you sort of you squat down, and then you basically get into a sitting position, it looks like your legs are crossed, but not, you just have your ankle on top of your knee, and you sort of like stretch your hip out that way, and I love that
Zack Arnold: It’s called standing pigeon.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, standing pigeon, that’s it. And so I was doing that once, and one of my AP just walks by me and goes, and I was like, what’s wrong with you? And he just keeps doing it, and everybody decided that my new nickname was going to be Stretchy Farts, because I was just standing there, squatting down and stretching, and my AP is a child at the time. My AP at the time was a child and decided to make fart noises, so now my nickname at that job was Stretchy Farts. So,
Zack Arnold: And it was pretty awesome. It stuck for the entire season.
Natalie Boschan: It did, it did. It was better than.. I don’t know, I don’t know, it’ll be better than that, or Toilet Water, which was a nickname for another person show
Zack Arnold: Stretchy farts is better,
Natalie Boschan: Stretchy farts is good. Yeah, yeah. I also got caught one of my.. when I was working on another show for with an editor, I warned him beforehand. I said, you know, sometimes I do exercises in my bay, and we sort of have this like railroad setup where he had to walk through my bay to get out into the hallway, and so I just warned him, I was like, sometimes I’ll be exercising in here, and he was like, okay, that’s cool, and so I was just like on the ground, like doing some sort of, like, I think I was doing side plank, and he just walks out and hears me on the ground, and he’s like, “Hey, what’s up? I was like, “Sorry, Tosh, I’d be exercising, but it was funny, we laughed it off, and it was, it was all in, it was all in good fun. He was, he was a good guy. So, yeah, those, those are my experiences getting caught exercising.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, that I have two quick funny stories, and then I will actually try and respond to this in a serious manner. I’ll try, we’ll see if it happens, but my, my two quick funny versions of this are number one, and you probably remember both of these, there was a time when I was doing kettlebell swings in my office, and I dropped one and scared the shit out of everybody, because it basically sounds like a bomb dropping. It was a 35 pound piece of metal dropping on concrete, and it’s like, what was that? Oh my god, I’m like, sorry guys that dropped my kettlebell, so that was fun, but that actually, the funnier one was the day that I did jumping jacks. Do you remember that I started doing jumping jacks, and everybody was running out of their offices, saying, “Everybody okay? Is everybody okay? because they thought it was an earthquake, and I came
Natalie Boschan: Out really long. Yeah, everybody, yeah, cuz minute,
Zack Arnold: Yeah, cuz I’ll do jumping jacks for like a minute, I’ll see how many I can do in a minute, and then I’ll go right back to work. It’s a super quick burst of intense exercise, and I walked out, and everybody had these looks on their faces. I’m like, what’s everybody doing? Like, did you feel that? Did you feel that? I’m like, oh, so I hate to tell you this, guys, but that was just me doing jumping jacks, and I remember everybody’s like, no, no, no, it was an earthquake. It was an earthquake. I’m like, all right, everybody, go back in your offices. Remember this part? Said everybody go back in your offices. Give me one second. And I started doing the jumping jacks again, and I just kind of collectively heard this. Oh,
Natalie Boschan: Well, it’s funny because the entire.. I wasn’t just the people next to you, like I was around the corner from you, and my monitors were shaking, and I was like, this is an earthquake, and I’m like, this is a really long earthquake, and everybody walks out of their offices, like, guys, what’s going on.
Zack Arnold: Well, and the caveat to this is that this building must have been really poorly constructed, because I’ve done this in other offices, and I’ve never even had the person next to me feel anything, but I remember specifically, and this was while we were at Empire, like I would just be sitting on the couch watching footage, and every time somebody would walk by the office, I’d feel things shake, and the first day or two, I’m like, “Man, there’s a lot of earthquakes here, and I’m like, “Oh, wait, this building just sucks. So it’s not because I’m 400 pounds or anything, it was just a. Weird thing about the building, where if you barely moved, you could feel it on the floor, and I nearly caused a floor evacuation because I wanted to do jumping jacks.
Natalie Boschan: Yep, yep.
Zack Arnold: So, anyway, now that we have our funny stories out of the way, this is something that does have to be addressed, and is an actual real problem. We actually addressed this on a show a while ago, where somebody had said, “Hey, I have these exercises on my whiteboard, and I had a producer come in and say, “Well, you shouldn’t be using the whiteboard to do things that are not done on company time using company property, which, to me, it was the most ridiculous thing ever. But this is a real concern that people have, and I understand it’s a concern, and I get emails about this, where people don’t feel comfortable being.. and I hate to use these words, but they just don’t feel open about the fact that they can be active at work, because our culture is so against stepping away and doing anything except actual work, when in fact it will boost productivity, it will boost your energy, it will boost your focus, it’ll put you in a better mood, and you’re going to be able to work longer. So, for me, what I tell people is that if you decide that you are going to go down this road where you want to be more active at work. Just talk to somebody in advance and say, and you want to frame it very clearly that it’s not about you, it’s about you being a better member of the team, a better editor, a better designer, whatever it is that you are. Go to your boss and say, “Hey, you know, I found this thing, it’s pretty cool. If you ever walk into my office and I’m like doing jumping jacks or squats or whatever it is, just know that I’m trying to do this so I have more energy, I can be more productive, and I can produce better work, because that’s really what it’s about at the end of the day. I’m not doing this just because I want to burn calories. I, frankly, don’t care about burning calories anymore. I care about maximizing creativity and focus and energy, so when I get home at night, I can be present for my kids and not be a zombie like I used to be after a 12 hour day. So, I’m at the point now where I don’t care what people think, I don’t care what they say if they walk in, because I know if I don’t do these things, I’m going to be completely dead and have no energy for my kids when I come home at night. So, I have a very clearly defined why that allows me to do these things at work that kind of make people laugh and say, oh yeah, he’s the crazy fitness one, like, and I, it’s all in, you know, good fun and everything, but it is now who I am. It is how I, it’s just how I work every single day, and once you kind of learn to own it, and you don’t feel like, oh, I have to hide it, and it just becomes you. Not here’s what’s going to happen. I’ve heard this from many, many people where they’re very worried about, oh, well, somebody knows that I’m taking a walking break, or you know, I’m doing squats, or whatever, like it could be embarrassing, but then if you own it and you tell people about it, they actually want to do it too, and they start doing it together, and all of a sudden you have an entire office of people that are saying, oh, I want to do that too, and let’s take a 3o’clock plank break, whatever it is, and it starts to domino, because everybody wants to feel better. So you can be, you can be that first person, you can be that leader that instigates that in your own team,
Natalie Boschan: And it’s just more fun. I just finished, I just finished listening to Essentialism by Greg McEwen, who you had on the podcast.
Zack Arnold: Yes, we will link to the show notes, one of my favorite shows ever.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and this book is amazing, but one of his chapters was on play and how we as adults don’t get enough play in our life, and how humans have evolved in such a way that play is something that helps us become more productive, and it helps us helps our brains fire at faster speeds, and it’s basically like it’s just helpful for brain function, and it is too. So, when we set up our gym, and when we get to take fitness breaks at work, I just.. it creates a nice sort of bonding experience with your team members and department members, and everybody just gets to hang out and play a little bit, like you were a kid, like everyone just gets to do jumping jacks together and laugh a little bit, and just laughing and having those endorphins, and it just puts everyone in such a better mood at, you know, 4o’clock on a Tuesday when you kind of hate yourself and you just want to go home, but you can, you’ve got like four more hours left to go, but if you could just stop and take a break to just laugh and hang out with your coworkers for 10 minutes doing something active, it really helps, and it really helps bond you, you know, bonding to your coworkers, and it’s just fun, and it’s nice to have fun at work. Can’t always be work, work,
Zack Arnold: Work. Yes. So, the very short answer, after an incredibly long one, is you tell your boss it’s all about being better at your job, producing better work on a more consistent basis, and wanting to create a more fun and energetic atmosphere. And they’re going to be like, okay, I guess I won’t have any rebuttal to that. So you go right ahead and do your stretchy farts in the office. So there you go, and you can quote the stretchy parts, please send them a link to this podcast.
Natalie Boschan: Yes, please do all the time, just want to keep perpetuating that.
Zack Arnold: Yes,
Natalie Boschan: Everywhere.
Zack Arnold: All right. Well, then let’s move on to the next one, which could be another doozy.
Natalie Boschan: This is from Scott D. I’d like to hear how you use Trello in your workflow. Oh
Zack Arnold: Boy, what. On a pot of coffee, people. Somebody said the word Trello around me. The first thing I will say is that Natalie and I actually did an entire episode where we walked through the basics of our Trello workflow on Empire, from first morning of dailies to delivering locked picture. So we will link to that as just episode 54 For those of you that don’t know what Trello is, Trello is heroin, cocaine, crack, and chocolate chip cookies all wrapped up into an online web-based workflow management system, and I’m going to tell them they actually need to put that on all of their marketing materials, because that’s really what it is.
Zack Arnold: Trello is a life game changer completely. I have actually become so in love with Trello that I am writing and designing an entire course for lynda.com that walks you through how to use Trello from day one all the way through building entire complex workflows for scripted, for reality, for documentaries, for delivering high volumes of work, so say you have to deliver like 100 corporate videos in a series. I’ll walk you through how Trello can manage all of that, and of course I had your help in figuring out how to do that, because you and I spent two years banging our heads against the wall, figuring out how do we manage our entire system and show in Trello, and we, I think we’ve cracked the code, and we figured it out.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I think so. I mean, even since that last podcast, which was a few months ago at this point, but even since that podcast, we’ve really drilled down into an efficient, like an even more efficient Trello workflow. I think, and it’s been working really well. And what’s been great is our post staff, our post supervisor, and coordinator have really jumped on board with Trello, and have started putting all of our team documents on Trello, which has been amazing. Because now I can basically turn over episodes, and you have all of your cards there for each vendor who needs something. You can then attach all of the specs that you have for each vendor, and I can attach settings that we use, so we all use the same settings and same export settings. It’s pretty great, and it’s a pretty great thing that we finally brought more people on board, because I think it was just you and I sort of working on our own little island of Trello, but now that we’ve like brought a whole department in, it’s been pretty.. I think it’s been pretty successful, and it’s been pretty great to see how everybody can actually collaborate and sort of minimize email between one another, and, and, yeah, it’s just way more, it’s way more efficient, and way more productive, and just a lot less time of trying to figure out, like, what do we need, where is it going? I don’t know, you just look on Trello, and there it is, it tells you, so, yes,
Zack Arnold: And
Natalie Boschan: Trello is pretty amazing.
Zack Arnold: So, now that we’ve talked all about how wonderful it is, I actually realized I have to answer the question, and I know that if I tell you that Trello is just chocolate cake that tastes like sex, that’s probably not very helpful, even though it’s true. What’s important is actually explaining to people what Trello is. So the analogy that I use with people, whenever somebody – and this happens almost on a daily basis now – either like when we move to this new show, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, what’s Trello? The way that I explain it is, imagine that you have a giant wall, and that giant wall is a whiteboard, or a magnetic whiteboard, or whatever it is, cork board, whatever you prefer to use. So, you have index cards all over that white board, or that cork board, except it’s digital, it’s online, so you can share it with anybody in the world, and you can have conversations on those index cards, you can attach images and documents to those cards, you can put labels on those cards, you can copy them, you can duplicate them, and most importantly, you can put checklists on those cards, which is the game changer for efficiency in workflows and not making mistakes and making sure that you get everything done, so now that I’ve kind of walked through what Trello is for people that don’t know, I actually want to try and answer this question, which is very difficult to answer in audio form, because Trello is such a visual, it’s a visual program, so it’s very hard to do it just describing it, but I actually just answered this question for somebody else today on Facebook, because this is probably the most common question I get now, is how do I use Trello? And he said, oh, you know, I’m trying to do a documentary, and I’ve opened Trello, and I just, anybody can figure out Trello in five minutes, but it takes years and years to actually master it and understand how to organize it, but anybody can go on there, create a free account, and create an index card and a list in like five minutes, as branded easy, but it took us years to figure out. Well, what’s the workflow, and the way that we use it in scripted, and I won’t go into the other workflows, because that’ll take forever. But in scripted, the idea is, and this is from tons and tons of time of you and I testing this and trying different iterations, and this one I think what we have stuck, like it finally works, and we can’t really find a whole lot of holes left. But the first step is we have a main board for every episode that we work on. So, for example, if you’re on a TV series and you have episodes 101102103 and so forth, you would have a 101 main board, and on that main board is where we keep track of all of our basic information, so if somebody came into your office with a piece. Of paperwork saying here’s the contact list for the department that goes on the Trello board, except it’s the digital version, so we would say, oh, do you have this in Google Docs or do you have it as a PDF? They’re like, sure, I’ll email it to you, that goes on our digital board. We would have our show timing, so every time I’m like, oh, what’s the magic number for our show, because we’re in broadcast right on the Trello board, we have links to all of the scenes that we’re going to be cutting that day, so we have a list of all the days worth of shooting for our show, and we have links inside all of those that go to each individual scene, and on all those cards we are attaching all of our paperwork, so I don’t have any paper in my office, and I don’t have a binder, I have a digital binder in the form of Trello, which I can access way, way faster. So, you know, if somebody said, ‘Oh, hey, you know what? Where’s this one shot in this one scene? Do a quick search, scene 43 that was shot on day four. Here’s the paperwork for day four, rather than flipping, flipping, flipping, flipping, trying to find stuff,
Natalie Boschan: Right? And it’s finally been.. I’ve been trying to do paperless for a little while, but it’s a little bit more difficult with my job, because I have to keep track of a lot more paper, and I know there’s a lot of people who like all of our paperwork is digital right now, so people just don’t print it out and keep it in folders, but what Trello lets you do is just have it accessible right next to your cuts, right next to your, it just puts it right next to everything, because I hate switching applications and going into different things, but what I can do with Trello is just set it up on my iPad and, like, let it sit right there, and I basically have my binder on my iPad, and I can just sit there on a card for the, like, day four card, and I need to sit there on that card all day and flip through all of my paperwork right there, and I don’t have to go from Avid to preview to wherever the heck else, Excel, blah blah blah, like I just have it all right there on my iPad, and everything is accessible pretty easily, because I hate, I just hate switching applications with Avid, because I feel like sometimes the computers are slow, they don’t, they don’t switch applications well, so yeah, I find it to be really, really useful in that regard.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, the other area where I find it incredibly useful, and to kind of go back for a second, actually, we go way more in depth into how we use checklists and how we’ve actually set it up based on our daily workflow. So, I don’t want to go through that again, but again, episode 54 point by point by point by point, we’ve probably, I think, we’ve probably improved on it a little bit since then, but the basics are all there, so I want to send people there first. But the game changer for me is not even everything that we’ve talked about. The game changer is how I’m able to track notes and changes. If somebody said you could never have Trello again, I could always just go back to my physical binder and having everything in front of me in books and having a cork board with stuff pinned up to it with contact sheets and blah blah blah, all this stuff, but if I ever have to go back to an entire desk full of printed out emails with red check marks on them, I will shoot myself in the face, because there’s nothing more frustrating than when somebody says, “Hey, last week you know you guys sent out this cut, but there’s this one thing, like, why was that in there? It’s like I’d done, like, 100 notes. I don’t, I don’t remember, like, what? What’s the thing? What are you talking about? What cut is like, there was always that sense of, oh my god, did I screw up? Did I do something wrong? Like, why did it go out that way? But now, because of the way that I organize all my notes in Trello, and everything is digital, I have every single revision and every change that I make to a cut, I have it by the cut name, I have it by date, and I have it by person. So, if somebody says, ‘Hey, there’s that one line of dialog, but it’s not in there anymore, why is it not there? Well, let me tell you. Oh, look, so it looks like this producer said that they wanted this out. They were sitting in my room, this was a week and a half ago, and this is exactly what they said, and they’re like, “Oh, okay, never mind,
Natalie Boschan: But I can, and it’s good when you track changes and you send out cuts to people and say, “This is what I changed in exactly. It’s a really good tracking, because
Zack Arnold: A lot of times, like, for example, I’m working with a director right now that’s shooting another episode, and he, he can’t be very involved, and I had to cut time out of an episode, none of which is a spoiler, because almost all television is long before it gets on TV. So I had to cut time out of the episode, and rather than him having to figure it out, I just use Trello. I have a checklist, and I can track everything, and you’re thinking, well, I can just do that in an email, and yes, you can, but I can always find that list in a collection with all of my other notes and checklists immediately organized in one specific place, so that to me is super, super powerful. And then the other level, and this is something we talk about on our other podcasts as well, is our structure maps. This is huge, especially if you’re doing either scripted with a lot of unusual structure, like flashes and time going back and forth, none of which we ever did on Empire. We never did any flashbacks on Empire, but if you have, if you have nonlinear time, then you can map out all of your scenes in Trello and have them on a board, no different than Walter Murch having his colored index cards on a wall. I’m not claiming to have reinvented the wheel, I’m just finding a way to mock. Modernize it and make it easier to use, and most importantly, version, because the old way of versioning index cards on a wall was taking photos, and then if you had to make revisions, you had to physically change the wall again. I’ve been through that with several feature films with Trello. I just have multiple versions of a board, it’s a genius.
Natalie Boschan: Well, and you don’t have to move every card, like if you change scene three, you’ve got to move every card after that, you have 56 scenes, you’re like, okay, now I have to move everything all at once, and surely you just move scene three and it all moves for you. It’s pretty
Natalie Boschan: Great.
Zack Arnold: It’s a huge, huge time saver. So that’s the way that we organize it in scripted is we basically have two main boards per episode, we have our episode main board and then we have our episode structure map, and they’re linked to each other. So, like I said, you can go into the main board, you can find any specific scene, it links to that scene card on the structure map, where we have all of our paperwork for the day attached to that scene. So that’s kind of the down dirty way of doing it, and like I said, I am writing and designing a course right now for lynda.com that goes through every single painful detail of how to go from minute one on Trello all the way to managing a team of x number of editors exporting and creating and editing hundreds of videos all the ever sending a single email and this is not something that I’ve done in theory I’ve actually done this in practice when I was building the activity video vault that I have for the Move Yourself program, that has over 100 short videos to be more active in your office, to do office yoga, to do stretches in your office, to eliminate chronic pain, if your back hurts, if your neck hurts, if your shoulders hurt. That took forever, and I had five editors working with me all remotely on over 100 of these videos, we never sent out a single email, we did everything on Trello and did our other instant message communication on Slack, and it was an amazing workflow.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and you can catch people up on stuff really quickly. What I love about Trello was being able to, because I was sort of in and out of that project, but I could catch up super quickly by just looking at the board and saying, like, oh, especially when you color code things, like, oh, I see that you know seven videos are done, like 14 more in this category need to be done, and I could see all the conversations and everything that happened pretty much within 10 minutes, you can get caught up on an entire, you know, months worth of work that people have been doing and communicating about that, you have no idea, you know, that you’ve been out of the loop on, and so it’s pretty, it’s pretty great, and it’s also just in scripted in any other television show, or any project that you, a video project, you can pass your work off pretty easily, so if you have to leave a project early, and you say to somebody, well, and you have, you have all these loose ends that aren’t tied up, and you don’t really remember, you know, that this visual effect was kind of weird, and then you need to put in this ADR line, and you didn’t mark it with Trello. It’s like, here’s everything, take my episode, this has everything on it, good luck, and it’s pretty, it’s pretty great.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, basically it adheres to the hit by a bus theory, which is my theory of organization, is that if I’m hit by a bus, and somebody comes in the next day, they’re like, oh, okay, I know where everything is, and I could do this, and Trello is will make the hit by a bus theory a reality, because with email, you just can’t do it, like, well, let me forward you these 47 email change with all these different lists of time codes and changes, and you’re like, I’m not going to read any of that, but you can just say, oh, you know what, I’m just gonna add you to the board now, and they’re like, oh, so here’s everything, cool. All right, I’m up to speed now, super, super easy. All right, so let’s move on to the next question. This one’s actually gonna be a pretty fast one, and then we’ll get to the fifth one, which I think is gonna be a little bit longer, which actually ties into the first, but let’s do the fourth one, we’ll knock this up fairly quickly, but I think it can be helpful.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, this is something that you know much more about from Simon B. Zack. I know you’ve said in the past that a standing workstation is now part of your agreement when you head for a new show. Any advice on how to go about trying for a standing station at a long-term employer?
Zack Arnold: Yes, again, this is something I’m very, very passionate about. The first thing that I want to say, as a caveat, is that I don’t think you should get a standing workstation. I think you should get a height-adjustable workstation. I don’t think that standing at your desk all day long is any healthier than sitting at your desk all day long. It’s not about standing or sitting, it’s about moving. So, I want to make that very, very clear up front: do not get a standing workstation and stand in one place all day long, your problems are just going to migrate. They’re not going to go away. They’re just going to go to different places in your body, but all of the horrible things that are happening to you in your sedentary still happen if you stand all day.
Natalie Boschan: Oh, if your employer doesn’t let you get it, like if they, because a height adjustable desk can be expensive, an employee can say, “I’m not getting a high adjustable desk for you. You can always get, you can always go to Home Depot, get some cinder blocks, and ask them to get you a drafter’s chair, which is, but then you can’t use handy dandy tools like the Pivot, but it’s a, it’s a good cheat for an employer that’s sort of a stick in the mud.
Zack Arnold: Yes, and they’re actually, I have a ton more cheats, I did an entire module about this subject as well. All about how to create a more dynamic work environment. One of them being a whole video that walks you through 10 different ways to build a standing or height adjustable workstation for like 13 bucks, 20 bucks, 25 bucks, using different tools. I think more to answer your question, he’s not asking how do I build one, it’s how do I create it as part of an agreement, or how do I broach the subject with a producer or a director, and the this kind of ties back to the first question, or the I’m sorry, to the second question about what do you do if your bosses catch you in mid exercise or walking or whatever, it’s kind of the same conversation that you first of all need to have, which is listen, this is not just because I want to do something cool. This is because I value my health, and the healthier I am, and the more energetic and dynamic I am, the better I’m going to be at my job. And what I’ve actually done for members of the Move Yourself program is I’ve written out an email template that you can copy paste verbatim, that has links to studies, it has all the different reasons where you can just hand it to your employer and say here’s why I would like a height adjustable workstation, and more importantly, here’s what you’re going to get out of it, because of the increased health benefits that I’m going to get. So, the moral of the story here is that you need to make it very clear why you’re getting it, because if you just go to them and say, I need a height adjustable workstation. They’re thinking money, money, money, money, money. No, I’m not giving it to you. But if you really show them, it’s like, listen, I can show you a height adjustable workstation that costs $250 It looks fantastic. Clients are going to come in and talk about and say, oh, that’s really cool, you’re really forward thinking, you’re taking care of your employees, maybe I’m going to get one of those. It’s a conversation starter, but most importantly, you are going to be healthier because of it, and you’re going to produce better work because of it. You just need to be a salesperson and make sure that you convey that to your superior. And at that point, a lot of people will say, all right, I guess I’ll give it a try. I mean, I’ve had quite a few people now that have emailed me and said, hey, I approached my supervisor, and they were actually really cool about it. I was so afraid to ask, but once I actually broached the subject, they’re like, yeah, sure, go ahead, and if not, if they’re just totally not cool about it, number one, you might want to think twice about the work environments that you put yourself in, but number two, there are plenty of other ways to hack a seated workstation, so you can stand and get up and down without spending the hundreds of dollars that you need for a motorized one.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and I think also, I mean, an argument for the motorized desk and the height adjustable desk is if you do have clients coming in and out of your bay often, it is, it behooves your employer to have a desk that you can adjust to sitting, because I assume it might be a little uncomfortable that clients sitting behind you while you’re standing there, and so if you had the height adjustable desk, you could get down to their level, everybody is sitting, there’s not the weird dynamic of one sitting, one standing, one this, one that, so it’s actually a better argument if they say, well, we have clients coming in and out, well, then you do need the height adjustable desk, but I was actually at a place where it was a night, it was sort of a nine to five type of job, and it was a staff job, and everyone was changing the height adjustable desk, like it was sort of an epidemic within the office, I think two people did it, and then all of a sudden, like eight editors were standing, this was like three or four years ago, and it was kind of funny, like all of a sudden, you know, everybody’s little setup, so how they like move their desks around, like, some people had their own little sitting station, or it looked like a little like desk, where you could sit and read and write papers at, you know, that you had in college, and the other part of their desk was standing, and so you can get pretty creative if your employer lets you, and you can sort of work with them to create an atmosphere and an environment in your bay that’s really conducive to working with clients and also to you being more healthy and thinking more clearly and being more focused. So, there’s a lot of options.
Zack Arnold: Yes, I think those are all great points. And I think the question that you need to ask yourself, and this is a question that I pose to groups when I speak to them, and it’s a very harsh question, but I mean it very sincerely, and that is, you need to ask yourself the question, is the service that I’m providing worth dying for? And the chances are pretty good that it isn’t, and if the service that you are providing is in fact not worth dying for, think to yourself, why am I so uncomfortable about asking this question of my supervisor, because if you are not able to get a height adjustable workstation or anything that’s going to help you be healthy in your office simply out of fear of not asking, that’s something that’s in your control. If you’re not able to do any of these things because your boss is refusing to let you do them, that’s still within your control, because you’re in an environment that you probably shouldn’t be in. So, you really need to think about it long term, and it’s not just, well, it’s kind of weird, like I don’t want to ask them, yeah, that’d be weird. All right, well, then think about the decades of health issues you’re probably going to deal with for the rest of your life if you’re sedentary all the time, and these are not minor health issues, this is now a health epidemic, so it’s about putting yourself for. And realizing that if you’re sitting for 12 to 14 hours a day and not moving, you’re killing yourself, you’re slowly killing yourself. So, on that light-hearted note, that was, yes, I’m gonna jump off my soapbox, take a drink of imaginary wine, while Natalie drinks the real wine.
Natalie Boschan: I know I finished my class.
Zack Arnold: Oh no, well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna have to take a break and do a little musical interlude while Natalie, and we’re back.
Natalie Boschan: Well, we’ve only got one more.
Zack Arnold: You’d never know that I was the sober one right now. It’s scary.
Natalie Boschan: You never would.
Zack Arnold: And Natalie will tell you, I am this annoying all the time,
Natalie Boschan: All the time,
Zack Arnold: Pretty much
Natalie Boschan: All the time,
Zack Arnold: All the freaking time. So, Natalie, how’s it going? Visual effects outfits. Okay, never mind. I’ll see you later.
Natalie Boschan: You want to talk about the day? No, not at all. I want to move on
Zack Arnold: Anyway. So the last question, this one is kind of a long one, but I think it’s an important one, and actually kind of ties back to our first question about time blocks and focus, so I’m actually, I’ve thought about how do I pair this down, and I realized I don’t really want to. I could be succinct, but I really think it’s important to read through this whole question, because there’s a lot to it, and I kind of want to dig a little, little deeper into this one. So, this is from Linda F. How do you get back your focus on a day when things are just not going the way that you want it, when you can’t get in touch with the scene that you’re working on, and your focus is on everywhere except in the movie. Note, my phone is in fly mode, which I’m assuming means airplane mode. The computer is offline, meaning not on the internet, and my mind is not troubled with stuff because I work with lists. At this moment, I go out for a run, but that’ll set me back an hour. To make up for that hour, I’ll work longer, I’ll go to bed later, and I’ll wake up later, and it’s just not working for me. It makes me feel like I’m not working the hours that I should be working. FYI, I eat really healthy, I kickbox every other day, so I don’t think it’s the food. Sometimes I just give myself 30 minutes to do something else, like online shopping, smiley face, but at the end of the day, I feel like I didn’t give the day or the project all that it deserved, so the short version of this is I feel like I’m doing everything right, but I just cannot seem to focus and stay on task, and this again is one of those things that I’ve had to dig very, very deep into, not just because I wanted to, because I had to by necessity, because I was the same way I was a squirrel in my office, not in a good way, I’m a squirrel now, but that’s because I’m constantly moving and very dynamic, but before I was the squirrel from up, it was a squirrel, like I could not focus on, hey, look at that, you hear that your dog was just barking at the squirrel, speaking of right, that was really well timed,
Natalie Boschan: Thanks, Lucia.
Zack Arnold: That was awesome. But this is a problem that I faced for years. I have adult onset ADD, and I actually think I probably had it when I was younger, but I was very active, and I think the only symptom I had of ADD when I was younger was the hyper, hyper focus, and that’s what got me through martial arts. That’s what got me through school, like the part of the reason that I was very, very successful at an early age is because of my laser focus, until I became an adult, and I lost that, and I got all the other symptoms that come with ADD, and realize I can’t focus on anything, and I have anxiety all the time, I’m constantly distracted, and there are a lot of things that you want to look at, look at when you’re looking at something like this the way that Linda is talking about, because it sounds like she eats fairly well. It sounds like she’s already active, so if somebody came to me and said, “Can’t seem to focus, but I’m on Facebook, and I’m checking my email, and I’m eating pizza, and I’m drinking beer, and I’m not moving, it’s like, “Well, it’s pretty easy to figure out why you don’t have focus. In Linda’s situation, there might be a little bit more going on, so the first thing that I would say is, if you haven’t tried actually time blocking, which it sounds like maybe she has, I would try that first, but given what she’s written, I have a feeling that maybe that’s something that might not be working for her. So one of the red flags that I saw was it said go to bed later and wake up later, and the number one productivity strategy that I can give anybody on the planet. There are really two or three of them that I can talk about now, with the amount of time that we have left. The first is sleep. Sleep is the magic productivity hack that nobody ever talks about, because in our industry, lack of sleep and exhaustion are a badge of honor. And on a side note, stop it, but
Natalie Boschan: You’re
Natalie Boschan: Ruining it for us all.
Zack Arnold: Yes, but sleep is the number one productivity hack. I could tell you all the different apps that I use, I could show you how I organize Omnifocus, I could show you my journaling workflow. None of it works if I don’t sleep. So, the first one is you have to prioritize sleep above anything else. If you’re getting anything less than six to seven hours, and I would even say seven to eight, but let’s say you’re getting six hours or less, your cognitive scores decline rapidly. So, not only are you just quote unquote tired or low energy, your brain actually isn’t firing as well, and the more sleep deprived you are, you’re actually getting closer on the cognitive spectrum of being equivalent to. Being drunk, and this is something that I’m actually mentioned on another podcast, and I’m actually going to be stealing this for Greg McEwen’s episode, where he said, you know, right now in our culture, it’s this idea of, oh man, I can’t believe that guy, he’s done three all nighters, that’s crazy, he got all this stuff done, like people talk that way, but nobody ever says, dude, that guy is so drunk right now, that’s awesome. He’s so productive right now, like he’s so drunk. Nobody does that, but
Natalie Boschan: That’s
Natalie Boschan: What network.
Zack Arnold: No, well, it depends on where you work, I guess. If you’re at a startup, maybe, but nobody thinks about it that way. Sleep is making you cognitively stupid, so if you’re having horrible focus issues, sleep is the number one place that you need to look.
Natalie Boschan: I was going to talk about night routines, and how it actually.. so, because I am a.. I am a recovering non-morning person. I don’t know what to call that, but I’m becoming.. I’m slowly becoming a morning person, but I was not one. If you listen to the Marathon podcast, I go into more detail about how I don’t.. I hate mornings, but what I found was is that doing a morning routine is actually quite difficult, just sort of like get yourself going for the day, but what’s not difficult is a night routine, and that has actually helped me tremendously in getting to bed on time, is when I set up these sort of nightly routines that I look forward to, like having my tea and reading a chapter of a book that I enjoy, and I set up these things that I enjoy doing, and you know, are pleasurable to me at night. Then I can actually fall asleep, you know, drinking my chamomile tea, because of the melatonin, and it sort of like calms me down, and it makes sleeping that much easier, which makes waking up that much easier, and it makes going to bed way easier, because I’m not sitting there watching TV and being like, “Oh my god, like one more episode of Silicon Valley would be so awesome to watch, watch right now. Instead, I’m thinking I have another chapter of Game of Thrones to read, so I’m gonna go do that and drink my tea, and that sounds amazing. And then that’ll help me go to sleep, whereas watching Silicon Valley for one more episode will just make me stay up and watch another episode, another episode, and then you have five hours of, you know, five hours later, and you get two hours of sleep, and you got to go to work the next day for 12 hours. It’s just not good. So I find that designing a night routine that can really relax you really helps too with getting to bed and sort of starting that sleep cycle where you can be a productive person during the day.
Zack Arnold: Yes, I agree with all that, but as an asterisk, I will say that I have willingly sacrificed days worth of productivity to stay up and watch Silicon Valley.
Natalie Boschan: It’s such a good
Zack Arnold: With no front, like I was like, yep, I’m gonna be up until 130 in the morning, I’m gonna feel like crap tomorrow, I’m probably gonna lose productivity for two days, don’t care, but I did it, knowing how it was going to affect me. I now look at those types of decisions, weighing it. I’m like, all right, I have all these things to do with my family tomorrow, I have a recital, I have this, I had that, I can’t stay up because I know what it’s going to do to my productivity, my energy, my focus, not going to do it. But then I’m like, next couple of days, I’ll be fine. I’m watching Silicon Valley, so yeah, they’re
Natalie Boschan: Thinking of the exception is okay.
Zack Arnold: Yes, exactly. But I, what I want people to add to the evening routine, and I’m actually really glad you brought that up, because it segues really well into my other massive productivity hack that I think hopefully will help Linda, and that is that before you go to bed you have to know it within reason, at least, what the next day is going to look like, because if you have no idea what is going to be going on the next day, you’re going to wake up in reactive mode, you’re going to wake up, you’re going to check your emails, you’re going to check your social media, and all of a sudden the world is going to be giving you their agendas for you, but you’re not going to have any sense of your agenda for yourself. So, what I’ve always done is I’ve had an even, not always, I mean always, since I’ve started doing all this research and starting this program, because several years ago I had no frickin clue what I was doing, but I have an evening routine where part of it is journaling and understanding what are the things that I’ve accomplished today, what are the things that need to be accomplished tomorrow, breaking it down into first having a giant macro goal, breaking it down into micro goals for the week, and then micro goals for the day, and then I have a sense of what are the most important things that I have to do versus the things that are urgent. And nowadays everything is urgent, for the love of God, everything must be done five minutes ago, and if it isn’t, there are four ASAPs on my email.
Natalie Boschan: First of all, love ASAP.
Zack Arnold: Enough of it already. But secondly, it’s so much easier to weather those things when you have a sense the night before of all right. So, if tomorrow is my ideal day, here are the things that I want to accomplish. Here are the times that I want to accomplish them. And here’s why accomplishing these things are important. If you have that laid out, and it doesn’t have to be perfectly laid out on the calendar, you can be anal like me if you’d like to, but even if it’s just spending five minutes before you go to bed saying, all right, what are the things that I really need to accomplish tomorrow, and it doesn’t have to be, well, I’m going to climb Mount Everest, I’m going to invent the next Facebook, and I’m going to lose 50 pounds, it can be as simple as, well, I need to send an email to this one person to move this. One project along, and I’d like to take a 15 minute walk, and I’d like to cut four scenes, like that’s that would be a great day for me tomorrow. It’s so much easier to stay on track and not lose focus when you have a sense of what your day is supposed to look like, and one of the habits that I’ve developed is I always take 15 minutes before bed and do this quick meditation technique, a visualization technique, where I’m just listening to a specific piece of music that kind of gets me into this routine, and then I’ll just quickly visualize what does my next day look like, if it goes well, what are the things that I will have accomplished, and not only that, but what does the process look like, and this is something that I’ve learned from professional athletes, where they don’t just think about themselves on the podium holding the gold medal or holding the World Series trophy, they see themselves going through the actual routine. If they’re a swimmer, like Michael Phelps does, this he has this process that’s called putting in the video tape, which, of course, was dating him and dating me a little bit, but you know, his coach would say, okay, it’s time to put in the video tape, he would sit down, he would close his eyes, and he would go through every single stroke in his routine, so he wasn’t just doing this daily affirmation of I’m the best swimmer in the world and I’m gonna win gold medals. He saw himself doing every single stroke, and that is something, and I’ll do that with my day, where it’s like, all right, well, I see myself editing this scene with ease and not being distracted, and I see myself writing this blog post, and by the end of the day, I see myself releasing a podcast, and am I always successful? Hell no. Like, there’s stuff I don’t get done all the time, I’m always behind, but I don’t have that sense of urgency and anxiety where I get lost in my own head, thinking, oh my god, what was I supposed to do, and I should be doing this and that. So, oh, you know what, I’m just gonna do online shopping for half an hour, because I don’t want to organize my thoughts in my head, and I have a feeling that might be what’s happening to Linda. Is just a sense of it’s one thing to say I’m going to focus, but if you don’t know what to focus on, you can’t just summon it without knowing where to use it.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and it’s a good thing to come off that point. It’s a good thing to sort of structure your day a little bit, and to know, okay, before noon, basically, what you just said is taking all the tasks that you have to do, and like finding a system to actually get all of those tasks done in a day, and finding a mindset where you say, okay, this is now I’m in focus mode, which is what time blocking really helps, is that once you train yourself into time blocking, and you know, like, I’m in focus mode for 50 minutes, it’s hard to break that focus, and so you read, and you realize how much you can actually get done in 50 minutes, probably a lot more than you ever got done before. And then you get to take a break for 15 minutes, and it’s pretty great to have to take a break for 15 minutes and not feel guilty about it. And I think that you get way more out of the break when you’re not sitting there, being thinking to yourself, I really shouldn’t be taking a break right now. I should be working, I should be working. That’s not a break, that’s stress, and that doesn’t make you even more focused when you’re on your next, you know, time block or sort of unstructured time of work, because then you’ll take the stressful break, you’ll work for 20 minutes, and you’ll get burnt out, and then you’ll be on Facebook again, and then feeling guilty again. You just get yourself into this cycle of like stress and guilt, and guilt, and stress, and it’s just.. it’s not good for your own productivity and efficiency. So that’s why time blocking is great.
Zack Arnold: And I think that that’s a really good point about the breaks as well, because I go on Facebook, I go on Twitter, I watch stupid YouTube videos, but I make the choice to do it, because for me it’s rejuvenation. It’s all right. I’ve done this block of time. I’ve been super laser focused. I’m done. I’m going to just do something totally ridiculous for the next 10 or 15 minutes. Maybe it’s talking to somebody, whatever it is. But those are things that I bugging you, but I don’t feel guilty about those things, because those are choices, because the breaks are important. But the other thing that I wanted to say to kind of piggyback off of what you were saying is that what is one thing that you know for a fact I’m gonna do every morning,
Natalie Boschan: Come and talk to me about what we’re doing. I
Zack Arnold: Always come into the room and we talk for 10 to 15 minutes, and it’s like, here’s how I see the day going. Usually, it doesn’t go that way, but I always preface it that way. I’m like, Natalie, on if today were the ideal day, and we don’t get distracted by outside requests and things coming in, like if we’re able to accomplish what we want to accomplish today, here’s where I’d like to be at the end of the day, and we talk about, do we think that’s reasonable? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, but you and I are always on the same page, and we have a roadmap for what the day looks like, so that way you’re not thinking, oh my god, we have so many dailies, and there’s so many scenes to cut. We’re so far behind, and I’m overwhelmed. I’m just gonna go on Facebook, and I’m gonna go online shopping.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, it’s sort of like your computer when you’re working too hard and you’re running way too many applications at one time. It just shuts down. Your brain does that too. It just shuts down as too much. Absolutely.
Zack Arnold: So, I’ll say to you, it’s like, listen, we’re three days behind on our dailies today. I don’t really care, because I can’t cut three days worth of dailies in one day, even though producers think I should be able to, so I’ll just say, all right, here are the scenes that I would like to get done today. Here is roughly the time that I would like to hand it off to you. You can help me clean it up, you can help me do sound, which, of course, she never does for me, for anybody that listens from the union, Natalie. Never does my sound work ever, yeah, right. Because no other assistants do sound work anywhere, but the point is that we have a roadmap for the day. We don’t always achieve it, but we at least have a picture, and if all kinds of outside influences come in and there are problems and things that need to be output and visual effects that need to be cut in, and we just accept that it’s like all right, that’s out of our control, that’s part of our job. So we just do those things that are necessary, but the key is, and this goes back to essentialism from the very beginning, the reason that it’s not stressful is that it’s not my job to manage all of those things. I’ll simply say to my producer, okay, I am more than happy to do these things, but what needs to be deprioritized. Here’s what I was going to do today. I’m not going to be able to do that now. So, how would we like to reprioritize this? And if we need to, then I’m either going to require overtime or I’m going to need extra time on the schedule to finish the things you wanted me to do today. That’s stressed about it not being confrontational, and they’re like, oh, you’re right, I did ask you to do 47 things already, didn’t I? Huh? Then you’re able to have a much more meaningful conversation, and then once you have that roadmap set, it’s easier to find your focus if you actually know why you’re supposed to be focused on and what you’ve chosen to focus on for the day.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and especially if you, if you do have your roadmap for the day and an interruption happens, it’s much more easy for you to sort of like look at the roadmap and say, okay, things just need to be shifted around, as opposed to, like, oh, why are you telling me to do these things, I had all these other things to do, why do I have more things to do now? Like, it’s way easier when you have your, you know, your to-do list in front of you, saying, okay, well, then I’m just going to have to rearrange, and like, that is just a way less stressful activity than just, like, oh dear God, what am I going to do? Am I going to get it all done?
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and the problem always comes in when you’re working with producers that don’t get that. Luckily, we work with amazing producers that totally understand that, like, all right, you’re right, you can’t do everything at once, and we have to be able to sleep, and we have to be healthy, and we have to have lives, but you and I have also worked in environments that are different than that, and at some point you’re like, all right, well, they clearly just don’t understand that I can’t do seven things at once. So then you have to find a way to manage that from a personality perspective, because we’re only capable of doing so much.
Natalie Boschan: We work on a computer, it’s digital, isn’t it faster?
Zack Arnold: Everything is faster and
Natalie Boschan: Institutional. Yes, the computer does it for you. It’s gonna take a long time.
Zack Arnold: My nephew has Final Cut Pro. This is not that hard.
Natalie Boschan: No, God, I’ve seen him do stuff all the time, but yeah, it’s great. I mean, I do that too with the to-do list the day before, so it’s good when you come into my room, and you’re like, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do for the day, and I say, “Well, my to-do list is actually already full from yesterday, so let me, let me fit in what we’re, how we’re going to do this. And then I could actually go to my producer and say, “You know, I have all of these tasks that I need to do, but Zack actually needs you to do x, y, and z task, and this is how my day is laid out. What, what do you need? What do you need right now? What do you need later in the day? You know what could wait till tomorrow, and they can sort of more accurately give you an idea of what is actually important for the day, as opposed to like do everything, and so when you sort of break it down for them that way, they’re much more able to tell you what you know who needs what and how urgent it is, and why, which is nice.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, the key, the kind of the takeaway from all this is that you want to put the responsibility on them, because they just want to say, “Here’s everything you figured out. It’s like, well, I want to do this to the best of my abilities, so you figure
Natalie Boschan: It out,
Zack Arnold: And then it, they’re like, “Oh, wait a second. Now I have to prioritize. All right, you know what? You’re right, some of these things don’t actually need to be done five minutes ago. So, anyway, I feel like we went off
Natalie Boschan: A tangent. We
Zack Arnold: Did. There’s one last quick thing that I wanted to say for Linda, which has nothing to do with sleep and has nothing to do with productivity and goals and your why, and this is going even deeper down the neural rabbit hole, so there’s a new drinking game, so that’s a bonus when I add the word neural to the word rabbit hole.
Natalie Boschan: Oh yeah, I didn’t even see, I didn’t bring the bottle in here, I just brought one
Zack Arnold: Glass. Dude, you’re gonna next podcast QA, you’re gonna
Natalie Boschan: Remember the bottle was way too optimistic.
Zack Arnold: So what I wanted to bring up here is there’s another level to this problem, so let’s say that she has done all these things, she’s trying to establish her why she has a routine for the day, she knows what’s important, and she still can’t focus. At that point, there might be something going on at the neural level, inside the brain, and I know this again for a fact, because I’ve gone through this myself, where I actually discovered that I had more than one TBI, which stands for traumatic brain injury, from doing sports in middle and high school, which meant that I had two or three undiagnosed concussions, and that’s part of the reason that I had depression issues and focus issues once I was an adult, so what I did, and for me, what was happening is I. Didn’t focus on anything. I just was a constant ball of stress and anxiety. I couldn’t do anything for more than five minutes without switching tasks. I just didn’t have the brain power to do it. It was physically exhausting for me to try and do something for more than five to 10 minutes. And I started doing something called neuro feedback, and I’ve done several podcast episodes with a doctor of neurofeedback, and it is a fascinating, fascinating process, and of all the things that I’ve ever tried, it’s the closest, probably, that I’ve ever come to a miracle cure of anything, like it is better than any pill, better than any food, any diet, like doing neurofeedback on a regular basis completely got rid of all of my attention and anxiety issues, and I won’t go too deep into the science of it, but basically it’s using very, very tiny microscopic electrical charges at very specific frequencies for the brain to teach the brain how to fix itself and create new neural connections. So, what’s happening when you’re unable to focus is that your brain is actually functioning at a slightly slower wavelength than it would be if you were focused and alert, and doing a task, your brain is actually moving too slow, which is why there’s that kind of that that oxymoron, or that contradictory idea that people that are bouncing off the walls that can’t focus, you give them a stimulant and all of a sudden they calm down, it’s because their brain is actually moving too slowly, and the stimulant speeds up their brain waves. So, if it gets to the point where you’re just thinking, I’ve done all this stuff, I’m eating, I’m exercising, I’m time blocking, I’m sleeping, and I still can’t focus, I would at least ask you to be open to the idea of seeing if there’s actually something going on inside your brain. It’s not invasive, there’s no pain whatsoever, but you just do what’s called an fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and it’s basically just taking a really, really cool scan of your brain while it’s active, trying to see the different frequencies in the different portions of the brain, and somebody that knows how to read an fMRI can look at it and say, “Oh, your brain is really slow in this region or this region, and as soon as somebody looked at a scan of my brain while I was trying to focus, they’re like, well, I can tell you exactly why you can’t focus, it’s because you had a concussion in this part of your brain, and once they zeroed in on it, and they started to rewire the neural connections, it was like I took the limitless pill, I was like, oh my god, this is what a brain is supposed to work like, totally changed my entire life, so that’s the last level for people that are saying I feel like I’m doing everything and nothing is happening. I highly recommend you get a scan of your brain and actually find out what’s going on, because you can beat yourself up all day and say, oh, I just have ADD, or I just can’t focus, or I’m just lazy. It could actually be inside your brain. So that would be my last recommendation, and again, we will have links to all the episodes about neurofeedback, if you want to go down that rabbit hole and take one more drink, including
Natalie Boschan: A Wikipedia page on FMRI.
Zack Arnold: It’s fascinating when I, when I saw the spot on my brain, and he’s like, “You have, you had something happen right here, and it was like this crazy movie flashback, where I saw exactly what happened in that part of my brain in high school. What had actually happened? I know this episode is going over, but I just never shut up if I don’t have a guest. But I was playing baseball in high school, I was playing catch in the outfield to somebody, and somebody hit the ball from home plate and hit me square in the back of the head, and I mean, when you’re in high school, on a small farming town, they’re just like, “Dude, suck it up, you just got hit in the head. But I saw stars, and I have very little memory of that afternoon, which means I probably got a concussion, but nobody ever knew it, and that led to years and years and years of depression and attention issues, and he just pointed at the red spot, and he’s like, something happened right there. Had the whole flash to it. We zeroed in on that area in my brain, rewired it, and now all the symptoms are essentially gone.
Natalie Boschan: Wow, nice.
Zack Arnold: It’s really, really cool stuff. So,
Natalie Boschan: What did he do? He took like electro, like, did, like, basically to your head.
Zack Arnold: Well, at any time,
Natalie Boschan: Just imagine you with like a helmet with, like, these electrons, you do, that’s exactly what you box your head.
Zack Arnold: Yeah,
Natalie Boschan: That works.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. Oh my god, this stuff’s amazing. I actually have a blog post we can link to as well, that’s called What is Neuro Feedback, that walks through the science of it, and it’s not like some crazy witchcraft. Like, this is now very documented, well-known science, especially in the neurologist community, and, like, neuroscientists are very well aware of it, and recommend it, like it’s a real thing. Basically, you just put on one of those skull caps that has a bunch of wires on it, and they monitor, I think, believe it’s 21 different points in the brain, and they just scan it, and then what they do is they just take these little – technically they’re called electrodes, you’re not getting electrocuted, it’s the amount of the signal, I think, is like a 1,000th or smaller of what it’s like to put a cell phone up to you, as far as the magnetic resonance, so it’s way, way less than putting a cell phone up to your ear, but it’s..
Natalie Boschan: I’m just imagining this scene from, like, American Horror Story or something,
Natalie Boschan: That’s
Zack Arnold: What everybody says. The joke that I made the first time when I went is like, oh, so I’m gonna be in a Clockwork Orange now, so it’s.. I mean, you look at, you know. Like, well, that looks goofy, but once you get the effects of it, you’re like, I don’t care what this looks like, I don’t care what kind of crap they put on my head, this stuff is magic. But the cool thing is that if you take a pill, the pill only really lasts as long as it’s in your bloodstream, and it dissolves, and it’s out of your system. When you’re doing something like neural feedback, it is permanently rewiring the neural connections in your brain, so it’s take it’s creating different highways, so
Natalie Boschan: You’re talking about like process, right?
Zack Arnold: Yeah, like, yeah, so like you
Natalie Boschan: Take the antidepressant,
Zack Arnold: Yeah, antidepressants, Adderall, Ritalin, whatever the pill is, it’s only going to last as long as it’s in your system, which is why it’s something that you basically take every day, because it’s not fixing anything, it’s masking things, but when it comes to neurofeedback, so the idea is they take these little connections, and like I said, at their, the amount of magnetic resonance is way like 1000s and 1000s of times lower than putting a cell phone up to your ear, but they’ll put these little points on specific areas near your brain where they’re saying, all right, well, this is a point where you have the concussion, so they pick the spot, and they’ll run a very, very small amount of electrical current through. You don’t even feel it, but what it does is it says, all right, if your brain is moving at a speed of eight hertz, for example, it’ll give you a signal that’s 10 hertz, and somehow I’m really going to butcher this, but in the podcast with the doctor, neurofeedback doctor, he goes through this, but basically your brain is saying, “Oh, this is what 10 hertz is like. I’m going to speed up, and I’m going to, I’m going to match this. It’s almost like a tuning fork for piano, where you know you hit a tuning fork that’s a G, you put it out next to a piano, and all of a sudden you can figure out how to get the right pitch for your piano key. Your brain works exactly the same way with electrical impulses, so they just look at the map, and they say, all right, well, here’s the red spot where some idiot hits you with a baseball in high school, so I’m going to put this this electrical feedback at a specific frequency based on the readings that we’re getting, and your brain is going to learn how to fix itself and create these new neural connections, kind of like a bridge, so if you have a bridge going over a canyon that’s broken, and you were to build another bridge right next to it to cross that canyon. That’s what neurofeedback is doing with the neural connections in your brain. So, it is fascinating stuff. And we will put links to the podcast, as well as the blog article that I wrote, because that’s stuff that I’m very passionate about, that I actually haven’t talked about in a while. But thanks to the neurofeedback, I now just have so much focus that I just can’t stop talking about it ever.
Natalie Boschan: Yep,
Zack Arnold: So on that note,
Natalie Boschan: Too much focus.
Zack Arnold: On that note, I’m gonna shut up now, because we’ve gone way over our time, and people are like, is he ever going to shut up? So, yes, I am. No, and Natalie will tell you that I just don’t, and I’m unapologetic for it. I really am.
Natalie Boschan: It’s all right, you’re good. It’s all interesting stuff. Actually, I was the one that was asking you the questions and egging you on. I knew what I was getting myself into.
Zack Arnold: Good point, good point.
Natalie Boschan: So,
Zack Arnold: All right. Well, good talk, Russ. Good talk.
Natalie Boschan: Yes, good
Zack Arnold: Time. All right. Well, this has been a helpful episode, I hope, for people, and if you are listening and you’re thinking, oh, wow, I would like to hear somebody talk for 25 minutes about this question that I have, just go ahead and go to Fitness in post.com/questions If we read your question on the show, you’ll get a free Fitness in Post t-shirt, a blender bottle, and you will be eligible to win the monthly supply of Athletic Greens, and we will be announcing who the winner of the Athletic Greens is when this show airs.
Natalie Boschan: Cool. Sounds like great. Sounds like great stuff. I want some of that stuff.
Zack Arnold: Well, question, thank you so much for being my partner in crime and pontificating with me. And hopefully people like this episode enough that we can actually do it again.
Natalie Boschan: I know, definitely cool.
Zack Arnold: I can’t wait till all the emails when people say, ‘Oh, for the love of God, never do a Q and A again ever.
Natalie Boschan: I know we don’t want to let.. well, I guess they could just stop listening if they really didn’t want to hear it again.
Zack Arnold: Yes, well, if all all eight of my downloads go back down to one, then I’ll thank my mom for listening, and then I’ll realize that the Q and A’s just don’t work.
Natalie Boschan: Yeah, yeah, this will be.. this is our last-ditch effort. See if it works. So, all right. Hopefully, people enjoy it.
Zack Arnold: Awesome. Well, thank you for being on the show, and I hope that we were very helpful.
Natalie Boschan: Yes, see you later.
This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, the show notes were prepared by Jakin Rintelman, 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
In this episode I speak with Dr. Michael Mark, a neuropsychologist and the co-founder of NeuroEdge Inc, a brain treatment center in Southern California. We talk about different types of neurofeedback, biofeedback, and BCIT (Brain Computer Interface Training), understanding cognitive function at the electrical, neural, and chemicals levels, and most importantly, how to quantitatively measure brain function and improve it.
Learn every step of our workflow at Empire from day one on the job until we deliver a locked episode, and every checklist in between.
Learn the difference between being 'busy' and being 'productive' and how to begin the disciplined pursuit of "less but better."
