Film and Family
We're a married couple of filmmakers, supporting our family of seven through doing work we love, together. It's been a long and difficult journey, and we still have a lot to learn, but for us, it's well-worth the effort.
We developed this podcast and the Feature Filmmaker Academy for anyone who wants a career making feature films, especially those balancing that pursuit with the responsibility of parenthood and providing for a family.
Tune in as we study success patterns of industry professionals, interview other feature filmmakers, share takeaways from our favorite film courses or books, and give behind-the-scenes breakdowns and insights on films you love.
Film and Family
Ep. 97 - Less is More - Change Your Life in Ten Minutes
In this episode as we uncover the powerful impact of time constraints on getting things done. We illustrate how setting tight time limits can drastically reduce procrastination and boost your focus. These principles apply whether you are managing household chores or attempting to finish a film with our 1 year timeline in the Feature Filmmaker Academy. Discover how working within set time frames can lead to more efficient and concentrated work sessions.
Successful runners often prioritize the time spent running over distance or pace, emphasizing the importance of consistency. We'll discuss how incorporating short, intense bursts of activity—akin to "speed work" in running—into your daily life can yield significant results. Tune in as we explore balancing endurance and speed work, and learn how limiting yourself can actually help you get the results you want faster.
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Hi, welcome to the podcast. So today Kent came up with our lovely title that this will change your life in 10 minutes. And he just kind of suggested it to me, like because we were saying do you think we could do the podcast in 10 minutes today? Because we were wanting to get onto the next thing. And I said, actually that fits perfectly with what I wanted to talk about on the podcast and we'll actually use that title and talk about if you can give yourself less time, why that's good.
Speaker 1:And I actually just last night challenged our feature filmmaking academy class to do this because I see them taking forever to do steps.
Speaker 1:So if you're interested, we have you can sign up on the bottom of the podcast for a green light call and learn all about this and receive our free one-year timeline. And in the class we follow this timeline and it's basically our free checklist broken down into weekly segments, and every week we do certain tasks for making your feature film. And so I said, hey, you guys, this week's tasks and all of these tasks can be done in 15 minutes or less or 10 minutes a day if you're just doing it consistently every day and you don't need to give yourself hours of time, like I do this with laundry. I realized the other day that I was giving myself like a start time for laundry but not an end time, and laundry would take me hours. I'd just be folding and folding and yeah, we have five kids, so there is a lot of laundry. But then the other day I gave myself a 30 minute. I was like I'm going to leave with the kids and go to the playground in 30 minutes.
Speaker 2:And I was like I'm going to leave with the kids and go to the playground in 30 minutes and the next day I opened the drawers and like laundry was exploding out of me, out at me. They'd been shoved into the drawer.
Speaker 1:No, I was like, if I don't finish, I don't finish, I'm just going to do what I can. And I got a whole load of laundry folded and put away in 30 minutes and it just showed me, like, what we give ourselves. The amount of time we give ourselves is how long it takes for us to get things done.
Speaker 2:There are days when you have like seven loads that have piled up over the course of like six days of negligence, but that might not be 30 minutes possible. But it is possible to say I'm going to work hard at this for 30 minutes and if you can get a load in the half done, you're eventually actually doing more folding than you are getting it poured onto the bed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you will catch up eventually it was a more productive 30 minutes than it would have been otherwise. Even if I ended up coming back and doing 30 more minutes later, I still got way more done than I usually do in 30 minutes, because it wasn't like I'm going to work on this thing until it wasn't like.
Speaker 2:I'm going to work on this thing until it's done. It was. I'm going to work on this thing for 30 minutes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like that's all I've got. I'm just going to use it and focus.
Speaker 2:I'm done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then it also makes it not so big in your mind Like oh, like to work on this for an hour. It's do this actually in class. Sometimes. I'll give we'll all just take 10 minutes in class to work on a step and we can get a lot done. It's like when you're not distracted and there's other people there and you're working together.
Speaker 2:There's kind of this like I have to stay focused and do it for 10 minutes straight, and then we're going to all share what we did, and so we want to like be productive.
Speaker 2:Well, and like. Another example of that is I am working with assistant editors that I'm training, right. I actually find that I'm super productive when I sit down for four hours and work with those guys on a feature edit Right and I'm not saying this to dog on anyone. These are really great, humble young guys that I'm training. They're awesome and I'm super grateful for their help because they're helping me get stuff done that I don't have the bandwidth for. But I could edit way faster than these guys. I mean, if I sit down and just take the keyboard from them. I could just scream through some of the functions that I'm like do this keystroke, do this thing, do that thing? And it's like, yeah, but I'm training people and they're getting faster every week and that's exciting for me and really gratifying.
Speaker 2:But however, in the long run, would I actually be that focused for four hours straight if I wasn't sitting with them in the room doing it?
Speaker 2:Because I've dedicated that time, I've set it apart for this one thing that we're going to do, and so, even though they are slower than me, we probably get more work done than I would by myself that day, because I have no option to check my email or to get distracted on YouTube or I'm not on social media, but that can be a major distraction, you know. Or if I start doing a function that's a foreground function, that something has to load and I can't work, I'm waiting for something to load and finish, then I'll be really tempted to start thinking about something else or getting distracted by reading about something else. But if that happens when I'm working with an assistant, then we start talking about okay, here are these functions and here's what we're trying to accomplish, and remember to look at the treatment and the story and what is the story about and what's our vision, and then it finishes loading and then our minds are still on the task, you know. And so just keeping that sort of focus is, I think, a big part of what you're saying, because you can't do that 24 seven.
Speaker 2:It's like impossible to like. I'm going to get my 10 minutes to do this and then 10 minutes to take my kids to school, and then I'll just drive fast, you know.
Speaker 1:I just want to challenge this belief that if you give your, it'll be easier.
Speaker 1:If you have more time and I think time is a really precious resource and a lot of us feel like we don't have enough of it because we work day jobs, we have kids, we have lives, but actually giving yourself more time makes it harder and more painful and take longer. And so I want to challenge that idea because I think we we sometimes give ourselves too much time to get our goals. And so, yes, like making a feature film in a year is a pretty um ambitious first film, like timeline, but you could do it in six months. You could.
Speaker 2:You could technically make a feature film in a day, like if you shot a one-er that you came up with that morning and you rolled the camera for 90 straight minutes and it wouldn't be a very good movie probably, but like I mean, maybe something amazing would happen if we just keep talking.
Speaker 2:then we could make a feature film right now, right, now we could make a podcast into a feature film, and I know that sounds silly and that sounds kind of like a content perspective. But in reality, like you know, most of us spend like the first decade out of film school not making zero feature films. And at that point you're like if I had spent 15 minutes a day, I could have made four feature films by now. You know, and I know that sounds a little reductive, but I agree with it. I think when we sit down and say I'm just going to get started, a good friend of ours said I'm going to go to the gym and I have to touch a weight. No-transcript, that's all I have to do. I have to get up and go touch a weight and then suddenly it's like I work out every day and I'm extremely consistent and I actually push myself because I'm at the gym. I made it all the way here. I might as well work out. The hardest part is actually waking up and getting out of bed.
Speaker 1:And that's the momentum part. That's kind of a different discussion, but it does relate to this. Because every time you like have to stop and start again and I'm not talking about like the next day you pick it up and do your next 10 minutes that maintains momentum because you're still like it's happening in your brain, you're thinking about it, it's top of mind, you're working on it consistently and that creates momentum. That doesn't mean you're working on it every second of every day, um, it's just regular enough that it's there. But but every time you have to like gain momentum again.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of work. Like you think about the amount of work it takes for a train to get rolling, and it's a ton of energy, but once it's rolling, it doesn't take much to keep it going. It just keeps going because there's momentum. And it's the same with our careers. Like, if you keep the momentum going and you maintain that it doesn't take much to keep going, and many times you'll want to keep going and it's like wow, 15 minutes was super productive, I can do 15 more. And if you want to do it, but like also sometimes it's good to set an end challenge, you know.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't make this analogous to running in two different ways. First, many runners great successful runners who have inspired a lot of people to become runners say it's really more about the amount of time you spend running than the distance you run. And so it's like if I can run 30 minutes a day, run 30 minutes a day, but if you can fit 60 minutes in, then it's like you're going to be a better distance runner because you're running for 60 minutes straight. They never talk about pace or miles or anything. It's just getting your body into that habit of starting and going and in that case you're kind of trying to make it take longer.
Speaker 2:But but, like for me, I do two different types of running. I do speed work and then I do endurance work, and so when I'm doing endurance work I take my time right. I'm not really trying to run as hard and as fast as I can. That doesn't make any sense, like it doesn't take much to tuck her out. But when I do speed work, I am kind of saying you know, I only have 30 minutes, I'm going to do a few sprints, I'm going to run as hard as I can, and it's really easy to just like shred my legs and get really tired. So what we're suggesting is adding speed work to your routines to help you say, I'm going to spend 10 minutes on something, 15 minutes on something, and that's all we have, and it's good enough, and I'm going to pick it up again tomorrow, and that kind of laser-focused minutes. Those laser-focused minutes are highly valuable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we're out of them now, so hope you enjoyed that and that you give it a try. Let us know how it.