Lower the bar

Lower the bar to increase your output

You’re not getting anything done because you’re trying to climb a mountain before you can crawl.

I’m guilty of doing this and it got me nowhere.

When you want to try out a new hobby or learn a new skill, and you’re thinking about it long term, you just need to worry about doing it.

If you try to get too ambitious and set the bar too high, there’s a 90% chance (stats made up by myself) that you won’t even get past the initial phases of the thing.

Which leads to never being able to enjoy trying things out because you’re always expecting a professional output coming from your amateur inputs.

It’s unrealistic, unreasonable and unsustainable.

All you need to do at the very beginning is figure out what small steps you need to take to get to the finish line. While also making sure those are steps/tasks you can do consistently over a long period of time.

We don’t care about output here, just inputs, inputs you can control and sustain so that you can produce long term outputs.

Here’s what that could look like.

Instead of trying to shoot 5 short videos daily, record one weekly video. Or instead of trying to change your whole diet overnight, change one meal per week a month.

After a few months your diet will be completely different and you’d only have to worry about change once a week instead of all the time. These type of changes help with setting you up for long term success over short lived progress.

I’ve applied this to my Youtube channel so that I can increase output, and so far I’m ahead of schedule on the video side by one week.

I’ve done a few things to help, including:

• Reduce the need to change locations every video
• Being less ambitious with the editing of every single video
• Increase the amount I write, so I have more video ideas to choose from and can record more in one day

These changes to how I plan the videos have made things easier, along with reminding myself that lowering the bar doesn’t mean ignoring quality. It just means to stop being a perfectionist.

Along with adjusting the expectations, I’ve done these extra steps to help speed things up:

• Recording more B-Roll when I’m already out
• Try to see if trips I’m already making can be used as a premise or a backdrop for a video
• Record, record, record (can’t stress this enough)

All these changes are currently allowing me some extra bandwidth to create some more content without the stress of an immediate deadline.

The videos aren’t amazing, but they are better than nothing. And the only thing that matters here is that I work on improving my writing and videography skills, which I can’t do if I’m not publishing anything.

So remember. If you want to get more done, focus on small steps, that you can do long term, and that will reduce the chances of you burning out.

If you'd like a resource to help with planning, and creating videos or newsletters check out my free content planner template for Notion here:

Content Tracker (Notion)

A Notion Content tracker for you to repurpose your writing into videos and vice-versa. It includes templates to help build out a Newsletter and then repurpose it from there. The tracker is built to: Organize your content so you know what stage you’re in. Help store your writing in one place. Build a video script from your Newsletter. Constantly visualize your ideas Know how many pieces of content are in your pipeline.

Gumroad

It's what I currently use to help keep track of my content and plan ahead.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for Reading

-OG