Starting off a new project (in my case a YouTube channel) is always exciting, however maintaing the same level of motivation and remaining consistent throughout the entirety of the project is easier said than done. A creative endeavour always comes with severe highs and equally low lows. And with the low lows come irregular posts or uploads (if you’re a content creator). Well to be honest, making videos is a time consuming process! And like other homo sapiens, my mind wants to reject a task that’s time consuming and frankly hard to do consistently. In my quest for ways to avoid the low lows in my creative process of making YouTube videos I came across a highly useful technique called batching! Yes, a technique that we apply to mundane tasks like washing the dishes, doing the laundry. Batching is heavily applied in baking as well! Batching tasks related to video production has saved so much time and pain.
Let’s take my YouTube channel as an example to explain how I apply the method of batching to enable a consistent upload schedule or keep the creative engine running. Here’s an outline of my YouTube video production stages:
I’ve categorised the process flow into three stages, namely, pre-production, production and post-production. Each stage of the process for is batched or done at the same time to enable a smooth creative process flow.
Pre-production
Brainstorming
Brainstorming ideas for videos is the most important step in making a ‘successful’ video! It also involves coming up with catchy titles and thumbnails fo the video. Most successful YouTubers like MrBeast, Mark Rober don’t even start writing or filming their video until they have a stellar title and thumbnail for the video. For my channel, I usually do the brainstorming activity at the beginning of each month (the first week of every month). Since I intend to upload a video every week, I brainstorm ideas for 4 videos. Sometimes when I’m in the flow, I simply write down all the ideas in my videos homebase in Notion. This also involves writing down title ideas for thr 4 videos and making the thumbnails in Canva.
Writing
Now that the ideas, titles and thumbnail for the 4 videos are ready, now its time to write the scripts for the videos. So, with a big cup of coffee and some instrumental music running in the background in my wireless earbuds, I begin the writing process for the scripts. It takes about an 30 minutes to write one script and in totality it takes about 2 hours to write the script for 4 videos. This is also usually done sometime in the first week of every month.
Production
Filming
Now that we have the scripts ready, its time to pick a day and batch film all the 4 videos. This has been game changing as it avoids the need to set-up the tripod, setting up the filming settings on my phone and setting up the lav mic. It takes about an hour and a half to batch film 4 videos.
Post-production
Editing
Editing is severely time consuming, I try to batch edit videos but its one of the most draining processses for me. The day dedicated to editing is quite strenuous. It takes about an hour to edit each video. Which means a total of 4 hours dedicated to editing. But batch editing frees up time to get on with other tasks or binge watch Podcast videos.
Publishing
Now that the 4 videos are all edited, the thumbnails are ready and the correct titles have been chosen, they are ready to go out into the world. YouTube’s schedule feature comes in to save the day! I just upload all the videos and then schedule them to become public on the relevant days every week.
And all of these stages of video production are usually completed with in the first week of every month. This opens up my calendar for the remaining three weeks and I don’t have to worry about by input goals towards video production. If you’re pursuing a creative endevaour and are having trouble staying on top of your uploads/posts/publishing/etc., do categorise your tasks within your creative production process and then batch them to be less stressed and have more time on your hands.