The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP018: Battling Burnout

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

In this installment of The Offset Podcast, we discuss those horrible feelings of being way overworked and becoming burned out. The truth is - video and film postproduction can take a toll on your physical & mental health and leave you feeling unmotivated, tired, and even potentially thinking about quitting the industry.  Postproduction (like lots of other industries) can be hard work, full of stress, and long hours - but with a little work, you can battle burnout pretty effectively.  In this episode, we share our opinions on fighting burnout and cover topics including:Why burnout is pervasive in video/film postproductionHard work vs true burnoutThe frequent disconnect between managers & operatorsA plethora of time management strategies including day optimization, focus techniques, and creating approachable blocks of timeAvoiding the procrastination snowball & multi-taskingLearning the concept of 'that's a tomorrow problem'Managing notifications and the stress caused by themExpanding your horizons by working in new genres and/or using new toolsFinding a side hustle and new creative interestsLearning how to build a focus & energy reserve Understanding & managing stressful personalities If you enjoyed this episode please be sure to like and subscribe and tell your friends and colleagues to check out the podcast. Thanks as always to our sponsor Flanders Scientific!

Welcome to another episode of the Offset podcast. This week, Robbie and I are going to be talking about something that just about anybody in post-production has experienced at one time or another, and that is burnout and fatigue. And how do you deal with it? How do you prevent it? And how do you recover from it? Stay tuned. This episode is sponsored by our friends Flanders Scientific, who are leaders in color-accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, editor, DIT, or broadcast engineer,

Flanders Scientific has professional display solutions to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Welcome back, everyone. I'm Joey Deanna. With me is, of course, Robbie Carmen. And today we want to tackle a subject that I think anybody listening to this podcast that has worked in post-production is going to be familiar with and has dealt with at some point in their career.

and that's burnout overwork you know that that go mentality where it's just nonstop and you feel like you know sometimes it's just the stress keeps piling up and you know you get to a point where you're less effective so we want to talk about kind of how that happens why it happens and some of the stuff that we do

and you can do to avoid it and improve it dude it's a serious issue I think for our industry I think you know worst case people burn out, you know, talented people burn out enough that they leave the industry entirely because of the fact that it's just overworking them and literally killing them, right? I've seen exactly that.

I do a junior editor one time, and I worked with her for a while, and, you know, we trained her at my old company. And I, honestly, she was one of the most talented people I've ever worked with in terms of just, you know, raw talent of seeing a story and putting it together. and I think the industry just kind of worked her to death, and she ended up leaving and going to a completely different career path.

And, you know, that was a big loss for the industry in my view. Yeah, I think our industry, there's no better or worse. This is just for the worse. Has is generally set up and generally operates on the idea that we are going to work people until they can work no more, and then we'll move on to the next person, right? you know a lot of times i think about like you know in landing in landing jobs and working with clients it's sort of like you know you can work your ass off for them but sometimes there's like a point where like they just they just you know they just expect a miracle sometimes right oh like sure we'll give you

four hours to try to finish this hour long project or whatever it may be and i think it is a pervasive thing but i where i want to start this conversation is is kind of the why is it so pervasive and I think that is largely, well, in part, I think, I can't say largely. I think in part it's due to the fact that the people who are often calling the shots in our industry are not the same people who are actually pushing the buttons in the industry, right? So there's a certain disconnect a lot of times in many projects for managers not quite understanding the effort that's required to do any given task or any given job at any given time. So it might be, it might make sense to the manager, whoever's running the

show to go, oh, well, they need two or three hours to do this when reality it's a full day of work, right? I think that's where it starts. There's a disconnect oftentimes between the idea of in budgeting for time and budgeting for effort and there's a disconnect between what it actually takes. And that's where it's important to know, you know, when you're when you're writing checks and you're the one, you know, holding the purse strings, not necessarily doing the work, and you recognize that time is money, there's going to be an inclination to reduce the amount of time. And that's not always a good thing. Yeah. And I mean, I think that if you ask every operator, whether they be an editor, colorist, mixer, who, you know, camera person, etc., they would

always be willing, not always, but most of the time be willing to sacrifice a little bit of actual pay and cost for more time to do something, right? I would rather have, you know, I would rather have 10 hours instead of six hours to do something, even if it means I'm going from $400 an hour to $3.75 an hour, right? Like, I would just, I would love to have that more time to do my job, right? And I think there's also a disconnect in as, and we talked about this in our episode we did recently about the race to the bottom, you know, shrinking budgets, right? Yeah, I get it. Money is going but time is also going down too for the same amount of work. And that just is, it's epidemic in our industry that that forces people who are like us and

like others that we know who always want to do a good job, who always want to put their best fort forward to do so much effort to within the time and money that they have that they end up just literally killing themselves and burning out because all these factors are against them, right? And I think that it's not something that can be solved like a light switch. I don't think it's any one single person can solve it, but being aware of where it's caused by, I think, is a play. The other thing I came to mind just a second ago, the other place I think where burnout, the reason that burnout happens, and I have to be careful with my words here, Joey, because I don't, I really truly don't want to offend people. It's not my intention, right?

But I actually, and I'm going to bring this home. I'm going to make this person because I see it with my own kids as well. And I think that every successive generation has always had this feeling. But we work in an industry where there is hard work, right? Just like a bricklayer works in an industry where there's heavy physical labor or a, you know, woodworker has to do whatever. There are industries that are hard, right? There are industries that are more than, I sent you a funny meme the other day about the, what was it, the worldwide global meeting industrial complex, right? There are industries that are more than just meetings nonstop 24 hours a day, right?

Which on itself is probably hard too. But I don't want to, I don't want anybody to not understand me clearly that post-production is hard. Even if you have a lot of time, it still requires a lot of effort. And I mentioned my kids because one of the things my kids are essentially teenagers and I work with them or talk to them about a lot is that there is a difference between feeling that you had a long day and you were worked and you were tired versus being burned out, right? There is a thing I think that is pervasive now with, well, you know, I just don't feel it doesn't, I'm tired. It doesn't make me feel comfortable. I'm burned out. I need three weeks off, right?

And again, I'm not trying to make fun of everybody, but there's a fine line between getting people to understand that hard work is required versus healing yourself to do that work. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's very important to kind of specify here because people will go to the opposite extreme. People will say, I only want to work seven hours a day. I need to have a two-hour lunch and I expect the world to be handed to me. That's not going to work in any industry driven by finances, right? At the end of the day, hard work and success is what kind of separates the successful

production or sorry, separates the successful people from the less successful people. The people that put in more effort will go farther. But what's really important in my view is to be able to kind of manage your time, target where you're putting that effort in. You know, if you have a finite amount of effort available, you want to put it towards things that are going to be productive and move the project forward, not tread water on things that are going to get you burnt out. You know, if you spend the whole day doing tasks because of some kind of organizational reason or whatever

that are just mentally exhausting you and you feel like you, you, you, you hate these tasks and it's not working and you're just, it's not moving the project forward at all. Yeah. You know, that happens a lot in some workflows and that can really burn you out fast for, for what? For what benefit?

What's the point? Yeah, I think there's a certain attitude of, and again, not everybody has this, but I think there's a certain attitude and I'm seeing it with my kids that once, once it does get a little challenging, whether that be challenging in sort of, you know,

it's being a tedious thing, whether that gets challenging and the fact that you don't know how to solve the problem because that's something that comes up in post-production all time. Here's a problem. What do I do? I have no idea. And then three, anytime there's like maybe some negative pushback from decision makers and clients, I think there's like, well, it's getting a little hard.

I just want to give up, right? And I think that's a solely, that's a different thing entirely than burnt out. Burned out happens to the people who do do the extraordinary effort. who do do the entire process to try to make something happen and run up against a brick wall where almost it gives them almost in some case it does gives them panic attacks to return to that task and return to that thing because it is so trying. That's not, I'm not talking about the people who get a little uncomfortable from a little bit of hard work.

I'm getting talking about the people who are worked to the grind zone. The people that are at the office until 2 a.m. and back at it at 7 a.m. doing that six days a week, right? I'm talking about those people who are dumped on by everybody else in their facility and their office because they know how to do something when there's 12 other people that could be assisting or doing that job. I'm talking about the people who could benefit from workflow automations and working smarter and not harder.

You know, it's those kind of people that I think are prone to burn it. Yeah. And it's important to just kind of know there's a balance for this and it's different for everyone. Everyone has a different tolerance of work-life balance and hours worked, effort put in versus reward coming to you in terms of, you know, billable hours and finances or, you know, more or less time available. That's a balance that every individual has to figure out on their own. But I think some of the stuff that we can talk about is how do you best optimize for that balance, right? If you, there's, there's certain things and certain attitudes that you can take

to these projects and to this industry that can make it so no matter what your ideal work life balance is, you're closer to it because you're managing your time better and you're being more effective. Let's talk, let's talk about that first one that you just mentioned, time management, because I think that time management is a key component to that feeling of feeling stressed. it's a key component to eventual burnout that might exist. And I often audit people by asking them some probing questions about people who are feeling burned out and burn stress. And it's like, okay, tell me about your day, right? And inevitably, in the description that they give, there is a lot of sort of dead time that might feel busy, but it's not productive time, right?

You know, so you talk to people and you're like, okay, hey, maybe you should use time. time tracking software, there's some automatic tools out there to kind of get a baseline for you, right? And I've tried this myself because at times in my career, I've been like, man, am I just dilly-dally-dalling? And I run a time tracker that it's one of those tools that kind of like tracks what app you're in. And so for me, for you, you know, we should be spending, you know, most of our time in resolve or, you know, creative applications, right? And I when I, the couple times I've done this, I've been like, oh, look at that. I've been spent like four and a half hours in a web browser. Oh, I've been on Facebook and Instagram. And you don't really realize how throughout

a day that that time adds up. Because, you know, let's put it in a color correction terms. We have a show. Let's just say that show is 1,000 shots. And we have, you know, two days to do it. Do the math, whatever. You know, it comes out to like a minute or less, you know, per shot to get it done. right. And so if you think about you're spending 20 minutes over here, 30 minutes over there, texting, doing whatever, that's putting the pressure on you. Now that time has gone from a minute or so a shot. Now you've got 40 seconds a shot, 30 seconds shot, 20 seconds shot. And next thing you know, you're woefully behind. And so I think one of the biggest ways of avoiding this feeling of burnout and feeling more accomplished is to really try to work on a self-discipline of focus. Right. And for me, I think I know, I know I have to work on this harder than you have to work on it because I think that once you have the type of personality I can't think about anything else until task is accomplished, right? Me, I procrastinate as like a coping mechanism for the stress, right?

I was actually, I was going to say the next thing is avoid procrastination because once I get, I have the biggest problem getting started. Yeah, right? Like if I'm looking at a blank timeline of a thousand shots, I'm probably going to look at the internet for a while before I hit that first shot. And I'm probably going to do that longer than I should. And I might sit on the couch and drink my coffee a little too long before I get going. Once I get going, I'll be in the zone.

I'll have the music going. I'll be like shot, shot, shot, shot, shot, shot, shot. And I, you know, and then I have to remind myself to take breaks, right? Which is something we should talk about as well. But like, yeah, procrastination is like a snowball effect, right? It is. you wait too long to get something started. Like you said, your time per shot goes way down.

So now you're stressed. Now you're rushing. You're trying to catch up constantly. And all of that adds up and it adds up and adds up. So one hour of procrastination can end up being three hours of extra work. And that's going to contribute to burnout much more than just getting started an hour. Totally. And I think I often experience that getting started thing too.

but I often, I think unlike you, where once you get into it, you're kind of laser focused, I'm like, you know, what's that kid's movie where it's like, squirrel, I'm like, I'm like that man. I'm like, you know, I'm like, oh, I got a text message

and I'm distracted for the next 45 minutes or like, I'm like, oh, cool, this thing just dropped for home assistant. Let me spend the next hour and a half like programming something in a home assistant when I have a show sitting in front of me, right? So that is also an essential, I think time management technique

that people don't really focus on enough, which is avoiding multitasking. Everybody multitaskes a little bit, but in most cases, multitasking is unnecessary and intellectually taxing when you're trying to get things done. It's actually a farce, right? You can shift between tasks,

but your brain doesn't work in the way that you can actually do multiple tasks at the same time. Like, you call it multitasking, right? You say I'm multitasking, but what you're really doing is shifting quickly from one of areas. You're switching quickly, right? So I think that's true.

From an actual task switch, right, there's that adaptation. There is, I'm focused on this. Oh, I got to reply to this email. Let me read the email, think about it. Now you're an email. Oh, and then another email just came in. Okay, now I'm going to get back to grading. Where was I?

I got to go back a few shots, see my context. So every time you do a major switch of task during the day, you're adding. a kind of in and out transition that's just adding to the total amount of effort. And not everything has to be addressed immediately. That's another time management thing that I think we all lose track of because we have these stupid robots that beep at us. And we just, every email comes into like, oh, I got to respond to this right now. You almost always don't have to.

And I'm so guilty of this. Yeah, man. But sometimes you've got to like let something sit for a while. so you can focus. So let's talk about those things because those are all really good things and things that are on my list too. I have like three or four,

maybe five super straightforward ways that I combat this when it's really getting, really getting bad, right? And I've gotten better over the years because I used to make excuses for like, oh, it's all part of the process and telling myself stories. Now I realize that it's just like,

I got to do these things to help myself. So number one, utilize, do not disturb type stuff. I think that that is, I mean, I, again, I'm like squirrel, right? So the second I get a ding, ding, ding, ding, you know, and it's really bad with like social media stuff, Facebook and Instagram and Discord and Slack, whatever, like utilizing some of that stuff to have your own time as good. Related to that, I often find myself, it's about like a level of time for dedication, right? So I'm not, this is going to sound totally stupid, but I really do this. I will tell, I will set a timer or I will tell like Alexa or Google or whatever, I'll be like, you know, set a timer for X amount of time for like 90 minutes, right?

And I try to make it through that entire 90 minute block by not getting distracted. It almost becomes like a little contest with myself. Okay. Like I'm going to go 90 minutes without any other distractions and focus. And it's amazing that where I'm like, oh my God, look how I just got done in 90 minutes of focus, rather than 90 minutes of going back and forth between different computers, social media, phone, whatever. Like, if I just set out a reasonable block of time to go focus,

okay, now I get 10 minutes off to go, you know, screw around with, you know, the internet or whatever. That's another one. Third, at my worst, at my worst, I have had to disconnect the internet from my computers momentarily, right? I know that you're a big fan of the kind of like total air gap, workstation, and I think one of the benefits of the air-gapped workstation is you've got no internet, right? I mean, like, yeah, I mean, honestly, all my internet's on a C-Station.

So if I need to go to the internet, I need to make a conscious choice. In my chair slightly. And that does help besides all the technical reasons to do that. Yeah, totally. I think that's a big one. And then I think the other way that I think about this particular one in time management is that I, especially when it comes, I think it's easier for certain types of tasks, but for like an initial pass on color grading, which I think is the most arguably the most important part of the process for us,

right? Where I'm just trying to get from the first shot to the last shot. I often break down, I create metrics for myself that I'm like, okay, in day number one, I have to hit 400 shots or whatever the number is, right? And I look at my time and go, well, it's already two, clock, I am only at shot number 238, I need to start hustling and whatever. And I think that, you know, kind of setting, uh, tackle, you know, approachable or, you know, goals that you can tackle in manageable in manageable blocks is another really good way of looking at it. Be like, okay, yeah, I can maybe screw around and stuff, but I have to accomplish this today. And giving yourself some perspective on what you have to accomplish as a goal for the day is going to

make it seem a little bit more approachable and make you feel accomplished honestly when you get to that point. Yeah. And, you know, if you look at specifically color grading, right, we talk about working in passes all the time, you know, think of it as a sculpture. You take off the big pieces first and then you whittle it down and down and down and down. If you're being more mindful of your time and your lack of distractions or your distractions and you know kind of a good idea of what pace you're working at, you might look at how you're doing your first pass and say, I need to do less per shot to get through this faster so I can organize my time better. It's one of those things to kind of think, you know,

you don't want to get hyper focused on one particular shot and start wasting time when you need to be moving the project forward. Because again, just like procrastinating, all that's going to do is going to push everything else down the line to be more added up effort. Agreed. I also find myself when I'm at my worst with this procrastination and lack of time management, because everything as you have discussed or mentioned as gets pushed to the back end, I often find that that back end becomes, happens at times that are not my optimal time. So in other words, if I'm screwing around all day, the next thing you know is that I got all this work to do in the evening when I'm maybe not at my most focused best self anyway, right? So I think another way

of kind of trying to avoid some of this burnout and some of that stress is to figure out what your optimal hours are and stick to those hours in a repeatable way. Right. So for me, I know that in the morning when I first get up, like, I'm just kind of a zombie, right? I need, I need like a good hour to 90 minutes to check email, surf the internet, have some coffee, kind of wake up, get ready to start. Whereas somebody like my wife, 7 a.m., man, she is on. And at 3 p.m., she's done. 4 p.m., she's done, right? So I think whatever that hour range is, I think it's important to figure that out for you, because if you're forcing yourself into time blocks that you're, you're you're, you're you're not the most efficient and you're not the most focused.

It's just, it is wasted time, right? So if you, you know, if you're finding yourself screwing around all day, only to work at night, maybe you need to shift your day a little bit to be like, okay, well, I'm going to be more focused on the night and not try to force things in and get things half ass, block your day out that way. Yeah. And I think it's really, really, really important, especially in this world now where, you know, I work from home, you work from home.

My commute is walking down the stairs. I think it's really important to maintain consistency, even when you're really busy and when you're not busy. So I'm down here in the office at 9 in the morning every day, whether or not I have something immediately to do at 9 in the morning or not. I am up, I'm showered, I've got my coffee, and I'm at least here. You know, I don't always, I'm not always busy enough that I need to just jump on the box immediately and start going. and shot, shot, shot, shot, shot. But I'm awake. I'm here. I'm not like, oh, I don't have a lot of work to do today. So I'm going to sleep in and just relax. Diving one more level into that, though, I think that there is, so what I have determined for myself is that I really, like, we're

recording this right now. It's 150 p.m. I find that from like about noon, 1 o'clock until about 8 or 9 o'clock is kind of my peak time, right? So realizing that I'm not sleeping in until one o'clock, well, I should say most of the days, I'm not sleeping into one o'clock. So what I've realized about myself is kind of separating different tasks for different times of the day. So we're like, as I mentioned, where I'm a little bit of a zombie, neat, just want to sit in and look at my iPad or whatever, that first part of the day. It's not that I can't do work during that time period, like you'll say from 11 to 1. It's just that I know that that time period is for a certain type of work. So that's what I'm doing. Yeah, that's the brain dead work. That's

replying emails, doing invoices, invoices, emails, you know, that kind of stuff and not trying to force myself to focus in time that I'm just going to be wasted if I try to do a mind-heavy focus task in a period of time where I'm not ready for that. And so I think that, you know, and there are far

more knowledgeable people about this and there's a lot of studies going on as we as we went through COVID and people started more and work from home. A lot of efficiency studies going on where people are most effective and all that kind of stuff. But I think that if you kind of break it down how you work best and try to tailor your schedule and your design of that to how you work best, you'll find yourself being actually far more efficient, less prone to burnout, less stressed. And I think, you know, in general, the American work week anyway, and it's probably similar in other parts of the world.

But here in the States, it's just kind of a mess, right? This whole nine to five kind of thing does not recognize that a lot of people don't want. work that way, right? And a lot of people are not optimized to work that way. And so what I would tend to say to people is figure that out and, you know, see what the most efficient part of your your day is. So the other problem that is related to what I just said is, I think you'll agree with this, that we tend to work in an industry where not everybody, but there are a lot of obsessive, compulsive, detail-oriented people, right? And I have no idea you're talking about. It doesn't sound familiar at all.

I have struggled over the years with kind of the bring it home, even though I'm working from home, but mentally, the bring it home live with something outside of the working day kind of thing that initiates a tremendous amount of stress. I'll give you an example. We're working on a project right now that's a little messy, has a lot of a bazillion different. deliverables and that kind of stuff and I'm sitting on the couch last night and it's like I don't know maybe like 1115 I'm watching the news. And this idea just pops in my head of like, man, I should, you know what? I think I messed up that slate. I should go downstairs and like fix that slate and re-upload the file, right?

And this goes to what you said, something can always kind of wait. I have, and I do that occasionally, and last night was a bad example. But I have tried to force myself into this attitude of it doesn't always have to be fixed immediately, right? And that my, you know, nobody at 11 o'clock at night is going, hey, Rob, you need to fix this. They might say something the next morning at 8 o'clock in the morning

or 9 o'clock in the morning, but they're not saying for it right now. And so I think having some sort of boundaries of what your work day is and bringing kind of work home with you is also a way of battling this, right? Like once you leave, even if that computer's at home, Once you leave that computer desk, turn it off as much as you possible.

And the way that I've, only way, only way that I've been able to do that recently is by also not looking at email after hours. Because I was going to say the one thing that everybody that works in post-production ever, if I could say one possible piece of mental health advice to give you is turn off frame-off. I.O. notifications because they come in tiny little bits, tiny little spurt. So if someone's watching something and they're just writing notes casually, you're going to feel like, oh, my God, I'm getting picked apart because it's email, email, email, email, email, email, turn off frame IOT. This is a funny little inside baseball story for our audience that we had hooked up our frame IO notifications to Slack. Also mute Slack. I was like, I was messaging,

Joe and be like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. And it was because every single time somebody commented on anything, we were getting these dings, right? Ding, ding, ding, ding. And you're absolutely right, man. Like managing that your notification, I just generally say managing your notifications can also help largely with that, that feeling of being stressed and overwhelmed and burnout because,

you know what you have this great phrase i'm sorry i cut you off but you have this great phrase that i really tried to internalize and that i really try to tell other people i'm going to say it right now and this is the best phrase that you say that's a tomorrow problem right now on the surface of it a tomorrow problem sounds like you might be procrastinating that's not when you that's not when you you personally use that phrase you use that phrase at a moment when you know that you are going to be operating suboptimately with the least amount of efficiency and at a time of day where your immediate response to it or your immediate action on it doesn't really affect the outcome one way or another right so it's your method which i've tried to adopt of reducing the

mental overhead and removing that mental load by going nope there is no good reason that this has to happen immediately i don't have to drop everything and run this is can happen tomorrow morning. Now, you might prioritize it as the first thing for tomorrow morning that you do, but you're not at 10.30 or 11 o'clock, going to leave your family, get out of bed, walk out the couch or whatever, and go do that thing, which is something I've learned from you and I greatly admire. And a few things about that. Let's take the frame I.O example. This legitimately happened to a semi-recently. It was one of those things where Robbie was on a project. He was getting a pile of frame I notifications, and he would look at them like tangentially,

and be like, oh, no, they're crazy. They're tearing up the whole project, whatever. And I'm like, nope, turn it all off. Wait until, you know, you can look at all the notes in context as a whole. Right. Because if you go in right now and start addressing these notes one by one, one, you're tired. You're probably going to look at it again tomorrow and just have to redo the work anyway. And two, it's probably not nearly as bad as the amount of emails makes it sound.

And then sure enough, like the next day, you look at the pile of notes and every, other note is, oh, that shot looks really good. Then the note of like, can we take out a tiny bit of blue here? And then another two notes of, oh, I love this scene. You know, so, I mean, granted, not all projects happen like that. But sometimes what looks like a mountainous pile of stuff at the end of the day with fresh eyes is much, much, much more approachable. So yeah, I don't consider that procrastination.

Like we both said, I think procrastination is the enemy of productivity. but there's a difference from procrastination and optimization right you know I get this all the time too like I have I have done you know I like to work on cars and motorcycles right

I have spent hours and hours and hours underneath of a car working on something really really difficult and just banging my head up against the wall and nothing's working I can't get that one bolt out I can't do whatever and I will just walk away the next day

it's a two second job. No, those are all great points, man. And I just think that no matter how you cut it, realizing when is a good time for you, minimizing the distractions and working in a, you know, blocks that are, you can tackle in an easy way to make you feel,

feel like you're making progress is a good thing. And I think at the end of the day, with that kind of general idea of time management, you're right, it's going to be a little different for everybody. But I think that you can minimize the feeling of being overwhelmed by breaking things down into smaller tasks and blocks, right?

Whether that's a time block, whether it's a task block, or whatever it is, anybody is going to be intimidated about a feature film with 400 deliverables, right? That's going to scare anybody, right? But if you break it down into,

nope, I got through the first act in the time frame that I said I was going to get in the first act, check it off the list, accomplished. You start looking at it much more as a lot of checks on the checklist, rather than a lot of unchecked things, right? And that really can kind of build your mental space there.

Now, shift gears here for a second because I think that we've, time management is a way to fight this. But I think that if you're already kind of in that zone of everything is doomsday, everything sucks, I'm burnt out, whatever, it can be hard to shift the, the mental gears out of that, right? I'll give you a case and point. Years ago, and I'm not picking on you because I think it was a, really, it's one of the only times where I ever felt you said this so succinctly, and it was,

it was amazing. You had been in a, in a zone where you were doing nothing but spots and specifically cut down after cut down after cut down of spots, right? It was like Tuesday, Thursday, 5 p.m., 6 p.m., right? And you were just feeling like completely, completely overwhelmed with just, God, I'm in, I'm just, I'm just, you know, whatever, I spit out widgets every day, right? And I think it's really easy for all of us to get into that zone where we feel like we're working on the same kind of project. I often feel that like I get really kind of in my zone with the same sort of tool set, the same sort of approach. You know, it's like, I often joke like sometimes I can break things down. It's like lift gamma gain, saturation next shot.

Lip game again saturation next shot, right? So to me, one of the one of ways of kind of breaking that if you are feeling already burnt out is to expand your horizons a little bit, right, in terms of kind of the genres that you're working on. So if you are doing a lot of long form, try some short form, right? Opposite, if you're doing a lot of short form, try some long form. For me, a lot of the revelation, often that feeling comes trying new workflows too, where like new tools, new DCTL, new OFX, new color management pipeline, whatever, doing things differently than the way that I have been doing them kind of gives me a mental

break sometimes and makes me feel like battle the the repetitivity of things and feel like, oh, now I have a new way of doing something. This is cool. And I just found that to kind of be a way of becoming engaged again with what I'm doing by working. working on something new. Now, at the same time, can be a little scary. You got to manage that. Like, I've never worked on this type of project or I've never used this kind of tool. But I think it can help with that kind of thing. Yeah, and I also think that that goes into something I firmly, firmly believe in. And that is, while we've talked about being efficient with our time, during the day,

you do need to walk away a little bit. Whether that is, oh, I am going to try a new technique on something I've been meaning to experiment with something unrelated to this project. Or I'm a big, big advocate of getting out of the office to actually go eat lunch, hopefully outside or somewhere. You know, it's not a huge time sync to do that, but it makes your overall day so much better, at least in my case, that just getting out of the office once or twice during the day, whether it's to get a coffee, get lunch, and you do it at efficient times, right? So we talked about, you know, you're setting big parts for yourself.

You delivered 20 files or waiting for feedback. Great time to go out. Yeah. I got through Act 1. Great. I'm going to get a cup of coffee. Yeah. Come back.

Start fresh on Act 2. You know, that's one of those time management things that I really believe in. It helps me along. Yeah. And I think related to the idea of trying different genres, different tools, I also think that, like, one of the ways to kind of build that spark in a lot of people, too, I would say it kind of like vertically integrate yourself into the process a little bit more, right? And you've seen this a lot with the classic term for this is the predator, right?

The editor who's also the producer, right? Who's now taking over roles. I think there's a lot of leeway in post-production to do other parts of the job if you want. Now, of course, that can come with dangers of doing too much and biting off more than you can chew. but I have often found that when I'm feeling a little burned out, a little stress about where the workflow engaging slightly different, and that could be, you know, with our workflow, that could be like, Joey, I'm feeling burnt out. Can you handle the button pushing on this?

I'll take over the admin or whatever, right? Or it might be something where I'm like, dude, you do the color. I'll do all the online. You say this to me all the time. I'll do all the online, Rob, you do the color. Like it kind of breaks you out of the mold of what you normally do. I love doing online editing. and because that's kind of my background.

And, you know, every so often, too, when we get into the stuff that's like right on the edge of what the colorist is doing. Yeah. You know, advanced blurs, composites, stuff like that, you know, being able to just be like, I'm going to focus on this for a little bit because it's an interesting challenge. That can, that can really get you back into your zone. Well, you know, this podcast is a great example of something like this for us, right? where, yeah, we like to blab about X, Y, Z all time and share it with the world. But this is also a creative, you know, a creationary outlet for us to walk away from, you know, the tedious task that we have to accomplish. Like, when we're done with this recording, we're both going back to pushing buttons and resolve.

But this gives us that hour or two of time away from that to kind of create things. And so I think that, you know, another way of saying that kind of vertigo it can integrate is like maybe find a side hustle for you, right? I am constantly amazed by how many people are really good at a lot of things, but only think that they're good at one, right? And so, you know, like, you know, maybe you're an editor or maybe you're a colorist, hey, maybe try your hand at doing some tutorials, maybe try your hand at doing some speaking, maybe try your hand at whatever, like something that is tangentially related to what you do, but you're still good at, is a great way.

Music has always been something like that for me, right? where it's like it's a creative outlet that I feel like I'm still making, I'm still creating, I'm still using my artistry. But it's just enough separated from what I do as my core competency day to day, that it feels different enough to kind of break that mental, you know, the synapses that are going, ah, don't do this anymore kind of thing, right? So it's a good way to handle it as well. Yeah, for me, I've got a thousand of them.

Not all of them make money, but some of them cost money. And they don't have to make money, right? I mean, I don't think, you know, a side hustle, I think implies it's like a, it's a, it's a money earning kind of thing. And certainly money is a motivator for a lot of us in terms of whether we do something or not do something. But I think there's also doing side stuff just for the passion of it to break the, you know, the ying and yang aspect of it, right? Doing something that is not the same thing that you're doing every day. And I've always looked at it to me like, you know, over the past 25 years, there's the creative work, there's trade. writing work, their speaking work, you know, and these kings all kind of feed one another.

And it gives me the flexibility of any certain day where I'm like, man, I'm really not feeling sitting at the desk all day doing grading work. I can work on some tutorials, right? Or whatever, it gives me a way out to still be moving the ball forward, still be making some money, but working on something that's a little different to, which is interesting. Yeah, and that all comes back to, you know, optimizing your use of time as opposed to just, you know, playing whack-a-mole. with your time, right? I need to do this. I need to do this. Take it in as it comes, right? If you sit down and think about how to optimize your time, you'll do better across the board. And one thing I think it's really important that not a lot of people talk about when this subject comes up, right?

Because it's very easy to say you need to have a work life balance. If you don't, it's the company's fault and they're bad. And, you know, you need to, you know, again, everybody has a different ideal work life balance. and that has consequences both on their life and their work. But also, if you can optimize your time to avoid burnout like we've been talking about, when the time comes up where a project is a absolute mess and you need to hunker down and work the 12-hour days, 14-hour days. Because that's going to happen. Completely push to your limit.

You're ready to do that because you're not burnt out by your day-to-day. you can still be the hero for your clients. So the Olympics just happened this past month. I know you're not a big sports Olympics guy, but there was something that hit me in the Olympics that I think is relevant to this discussion. I was watching the sprinters, right, and the heats before, like, you know, as they're getting, you know, going from quarterfinals, semifinals, finals, you know, you often see these elite athletes, like, they'll pull up a little bit at the end of the race, right,

to kind of conserve some energy. And that's exactly kind of what you're saying or hinting at, right? Is that like if you go full on, full out all the time, you're just inviting that you're not going to have your best when which comes to shove when you really need it, right? So realizing a little bit too of like, you know, I've said this before in other ways, like not everything is art. Sometimes you just got to do the project and move on, not let it consume you is the same

thing as that sprinter, right? There are certain projects where it's just like, no. I'll do this project. I'll do it to the best of my ability. I'll do a good job. But you don't necessarily, for a lot of reasons, budget, schedule, whatever, you're not necessarily having to do that full on extra gear, if you will, you know, in car terms, right?

And I think that's a really good point that you make because there are projects that you're going to want to, for whatever reason, push it extra far. Maybe it's a project, a passion project or a friend of yours that you love. Maybe it's something that's really paying a lot of money, and so you want to do, you know, I don't know. There's a lot of things that could do it. but having some reserve, I think is a really important part of this. And to that other end, the flip side of that same coin, Joey, is that I do want to stress that no matter, I said this at the top of the episode, we do work in a hard industry.

And there are people that are going to push you. And I think one of the other things, the last thing I have to discuss today is dealing with the personalities that contribute to. distress and to burnout, right? When I first graduated college, I went to go work at a very large network for, I lasted about a week and a lot of the year. And there was a manager who will go nameless, but who's infamous in the DC TV world, who day number one, like I had literally gotten my key card and was like getting the tour of the facility started yelling me.

I can't even remember what it was. something, just yelling, right? And our industry, unfortunately, is full of a lot of those personalities, right? People who think that by belittling you, by yelling at you, whatever, like, they're going to get, they think they're like football coaches, right? Somebody, they watched a movie sometime where they saw, like, some guy giving a motivational speech by yelling at somebody. There are a lot of people who just break down to that kind of thing, right, and just close off and won't give their best effort. And I think that all of us can try our best to kind of to identify and eliminate a lot of that behavior in our industry because at the end of the day, we're making movies, we're making

TV. Like we've said this before, it's not open heart surgery. Nobody's going to die. Nobody's going to die from anything like that. And the people who treat it like that are a little bit toxic. They contribute to a lot of people, myself included sometimes, feeling overwhelmed and that kind of stuff. And I just don't think there's a place for that in our industry. I think that more... No. The best thing you can do to slow that down and to stop it from happening is to not do it yourself. You know, when you're in a position where you're managing other people or you're interacting as the leader of a project, you know, just take that into effect.

And, you know, don't do that kind of bad management yourself. And that will set the example. But you can't all... Another thing to really remember is you can't all... control what other people do or how they act, but you can control if you really internalize it and, you know, take it as a slight. Some people are just jerks. Yeah, and, you know, sometimes I often, I often think about this and you've said this to me a lot. My wife has said this to me a lot. Other people I care for a lot have said this to me is that sometimes you's got to give people the

benefit of the doubt, right? Like, you know, somebody might be barking at you because, you know what, whatever they had they had uh that morning they had an argument with their their their partner or their spouse or whatever and they left the house and they're in a really crappy mood and now you're just getting the brunt of it right sometimes you just kind of have to let it roll off the other shoulder uh if it's a repetitive thing that's different like if it's happening time and time and time again well but sometimes people just have bad days um and sometimes you just shouldn't shouldn't internalize that kind of stuff and i think the same thing you know goes for feedback, you know, comments on email, that kind of stuff.

You just have to remind yourself sometimes if you're feeling edgy and feeling like you're right on that case, a burnout, whatever, is that sometimes people don't really mean what they, your interpretation of what they said is not really what they meant. Tone was not implied, all of those kind of things. Yeah, and it's funny because, you know, we've all been that person, I think, at one point or another in our career. And we'd like to think that it hasn't happened. but if you're self-aware at all, you can probably look back at the times and say,

hey, I was out of line here. I remember I was one coworker I was working with for one particular week that he started this week. And I'm still very good friends with him. And he's very talented guy. And we get along great. But he thought I was the absolute worst because he started the week. I came back from my son being born. So his like first day was my first day back at work with my first infant child and hadn't slept in two weeks.

And oh yeah, by the way, I decided to quit cold turkey, quit smoking cold turkey the day David was born. So yeah, I, you were a delight. I was not a delight. And I'm glad eventually I kind of evolved out of that. but like a little bit of self-awareness can go a long way to fixing those things. I think that I think that goes both ways too. I think that, you know, I have said to clients and I've said to you personally sometimes where I've, whatever, I've gone off the deep end and I've been like really like upset about

something or whatever, again, slept on it, you know, a little distance from the actual issue. And I think it's, it's, while it's important for the person who's, you know, might be, you know, that manager I talked about earlier, telling it people. I think it's just as important that if you make a reactionary kind of thing or you get upset about it, that you do that same level of apology or, you know, stepping it back to and go, hey, you know what, guys, sorry yesterday. I just didn't have a lot of sleep. My, you know, my family, whatever the issue is, I'm sorry for the way that I'll try not to make that happen again. Goes a long way from just assuming that everybody just assumed that

you had a bad day, right? Like, just actual verbalizing that sometimes can go, a long way because everybody's been there, right? Like, everybody's had problems at home or issues that, you know, whatever. Saying that sometimes goes, goes a long way. So, you know, you've got to make sure you're not always right about everything forever, right? You've got to be able to kind of move your brain a little bit. And because if you hold on to the stressors that happen day to day, oh, this project didn't go how I wanted and I was really upset about it.

And I'm going to be, you know, butt heard about that forever. All you're doing, like we've talked about basically for this entire episode, is you're stacking it up and it's going to add up at the end when you don't want it to. We create a lot of stress for us. And I think the people that I admire most in this industry look at things as they come to them. This is a problem I have to tackle now. They're not looking 30 steps. ahead at the potential problems, they're not projecting out of what the problems may or may not be.

They're not telling stories to themselves about all the disasters that may happen. And I think that as an industry and operators, we tend to do that a lot. We go, what if, what if, what if, instead of just tackling the problems as they're right in front of us. And I think that being kind of present in just tackling the things that are right there goes a long way to managing that stress too. Yeah. So like last thing I'm going to say is like we've kind of touched on if if I could summarize my thoughts on the entire like ecosystem of issues here, it is that yes, working in post production is hard. Yeah. It's going to take a lot of effort. The people that do put in the effort are the ones that are successful. And sometimes you do need to push, right? You do need to buckle down and go the extra mile and really kick ass on a.

project. And the only way to really make that happen is if you can manage your time and manage your emotions and how you work with things like procrastination and time management and dealing with burnout, you need to actively prevent those problems from getting worse and worse and worse. So when the time comes where you really need to be on your game, you're ready. and everything we talked about makes a difference, but thinking consistent. Like we talk about consistency with hours, consistency with techniques,

consistency with how you deal with things. I think consistency is a very big driver in how you can kind of achieve the work-life balance that you want to have. And lastly, I'll say, it's just finding a confident that you can talk about with this stuff too, right? That somebody like, you know,

it's funny because my wife, Catherine makes fun of me sometimes because I sometimes share more about the stressors in my life with you than I do with her. And I've always been like, well, it's not like I'm not trying to like cut you out of my emotional, in my emotional food chain here. It's just more of like if I explain why something drives me crazy, that's a super technical thing. God, these people always deliver mats that are named. this way or whatever, like she's going to go, that's stressful, whereas you might go, oh, that's such a pain in the butt, right? So it doesn't matter who it is really.

And maybe you have multiple people, but finding, I think, a confidant that you can describe some of these things too is important because, you know, there is some level of stress relief through solidarity too, where people who are like, oh, yeah, I get it. I understand what you're going through and I understand that pain. Like, you know, kind of the difference between empathy and like sympathizing, right? You know, somebody in the trenches can really get it and really go, I sympathize, man. I've been right there before with you and understand that problem, whereas somebody maybe not in the chain goes, they can empathize, but they might not really get it. And so, yeah, finding that person is important too.

So good stuff, man. Well, hopefully at the end of the show, you're feeling a little more relaxed, a little more ways to manage this stress of feeling, you know, burned out or whatever. You know, if you do feel like you're getting burned out, I'm going to echo what Joey said earlier. to downtime is a good thing i have found that time space can kind of cure a lot of problems you know and also sometimes you know there are situations that are untenable if you find yourself in a situation that is completely untenable and you've tried to do everything within your power to fix and make work sometimes it's just not worth it you know your mental health your physical health all those things are trust me are a lot worth a lot more than you know making a tv show uh and so

deal with these things as they come. Be conscious in your approach, be conscious in your management of time and emotions and that kind of stuff. And hopefully it will help you feel a little less stress. So good stuff. As a reminder, everybody, you can check out this and all of our episodes on YouTube. Just search for The Offset Podcasts. You can also find us on YouTube by using our handle, The Offset Pod. And if you're on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you can do the same thing. You can search for the Offset Podcasts. We're present on those platforms. And lastly, a lot of people don't realize we do have a website for the show. It's just

Offsetpodcast.com and on that page we have a submission button. So if you have an idea for a show that you'd like, a topic that you'd like to see us cover, feel free to use that. It comes right to us and we'll consider it for a future show. As always, thanks to our editor Stella for helping put the show together. Big thanks

to our pals at Flanders Scientific for being a sponsor of the show. And thank you to you guys for checking out another episode of the Offset Podcast. Remember wherever you find the show, please subscribe. and like. So I'm Robbie Carmen for The Offset Podcast. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for watching.