What’s the point of all this sh*t?
What happens when I reach my breaking point
Welcome back to Slacker Stuff, a weekly column for professional creatives, heads of content, or anyone else aspiring to be a creative leader.
The Moment
On Wednesday, January 21st, I had a moment where I nearly gave up on my dream. It was 5:00 p.m. I had just finished my work for the day with Mostly Media on the Run the Numbers Podcast starring CJ Gustafson (shoutout CJ, he’s a huge Slacker Stuff fan). I was in a pretty good spot: I’ve figured out that it takes me pretty much exactly four hours to create a filler video for Slacker Stuff that I upload to YouTube and other platforms (below is one of my recent favorites), so if I focused, I would be done by 9.
I did a little bit of work on a new short, but then the moment hit. It’s a moment that I feel like I’ve hit a lot of times before. I’ve mentioned it before, this familiar pattern where I set a goal for myself, and in the process of trying to meet that goal, I question whether I’m doing the right thing. This circle of overthinking stops me in my tracks, and it eventually culminates in a moment like this one.
I call this moment the “what’s the” point. Here I was feeling it again. It usually comes about when the vision is obscured, when I don’t have a clear vision of my goal, and this time I was feeling it pretty hard. Why was I forcing myself to create a filler video? Why couldn’t I just chill on the couch with my cat? Shouldn’t I be working on something else, like a long-form podcast or full-length YouTube video? I needed to reset and remind myself of the goal.
https://youtube.com/shorts/nNYA80dBPG8
The Goal
Back in July of last year, I had the idea to make YouTube shorts every single day, to execute on the ideas I had quickly and see if they resonated with people or if they were just interesting in my own head. Then I realized I couldn’t do that every day. That’s a 20-hour work week. So I tried every other day…and I didn’t really have time to do that either.
At the beginning of the year, I reassessed again and I set this goal for myself: I was going to publish a Substack column every Saturday at 5:05 a.m., and I was going to put out a filler video on Mondays and Thursdays. I calculated that it takes me about two hours to put together the column you’re reading here on Substack, and, like I mentioned previously, it takes four hours to make each filler video. That’s a 10-hour work week for Slacker Stuff.
I figured by regularly showing up with the filler and the column content that I can slowly build an audience that will open opportunities for me. Perhaps I’ll make paid content, a gated Substack article, or anything else in the toolbelt of a modestly successful influencer. I’ll be a YouTuber, just like I dreamed of over 15 years ago.
The Constraint
Just because I want to see where Slacker Stuff can go doesn’t mean I want to quit my day job. It isn’t some boring, droning desk job. I really do enjoy it. It’s different than the work I do for Slacker Stuff, and it stimulates my mind, presenting an interesting challenge of catering to a demographic I do not belong to. That’s what makes this balance thing so tough.
It’s not like I’m working all day hating my work, waiting until I can work on the things that I want to work on. Instead, it forces me to face the fact that I only have so many hours in the day. My job is typically 40 to 50 hours a week, sometimes a little bit more when deadlines hit. The time I have every week to dedicate towards Slacker Stuff is finite. The only way I get more time is if I take it out of my personal life, sleep, or Mostly Media; none of which I am willing to compromise.
I have roughly ten hours each week that I can dedicate to Slacker Stuff. That’s the filler videos, the column, or anything else I want to do. It works out to about an hour each day during the workweek, and then two hours on Saturday and Sunday. Sometimes I find a little bit extra, but that’s really the only time I have unless I’m on vacation or it’s a holiday.
The Spiral
So, bringing it back to Wednesday: I knew I had four hours to make a video for Thursday. I got to that “what’s the” point. Suddenly I was thinking, well, wait a second… I can’t make long-form videos. I can’t make podcasts. I have all these ideas outside of just making shorts and writing the Substack that I want to experiment with, and I just don’t have the time to do them.
I got extremely overwhelmed by not having enough time to do the things that I wanted to do. I felt stuck in a trap of my own design: that super genius Benjamin made me this schedule. I started thinking maybe I could change things up, maybe I could figure this out a different way. But instead, I talked myself out of making the YouTube short altogether. I disappointed myself. I let myself down.
What really happened is that I was so fixated on what I should be doing, not what I could be doing or what I was doing. I do want to make long-form videos about topics I’m interested in, transit, movies, TV shows, whatever, but I just don’t have the time to do that right now unless I change the schedule.
I skipped Thursday’s video initially. I went down this shame spiral, feeling like I wasn’t doing enough or working on the right things. It felt like everything I had worked towards so far wasn’t worth it. I kept beating myself up for giving up on something that I had barely even begun. Fortunately, with the help of a phone call to my parents Wednesday, and therapy the next day, I think I found a way to keep going…
Stop. Give yourself a break. By speaking with others, I not only heard different perspectives, but I also processed what I was feeling and figured out what it meant in the space that dialogue gave me. The whole point of all this is to have fun, and if I’m not having fun, why should I force it?
The Refocus
I set up the Monday, Thursday, Saturday schedule for a reason: it creates an opportunity for me to do a little bit of all the things I like doing. The urge I had to stop everything and start something else was a symptom of me missing the forest for the trees. I stopped focusing on showing up every day to put in the work and became fixated on the binary of meeting a goal or not meeting a goal. The truth is, I have only just begun this journey.
I want to create my own work and talk about things I’m passionate about … I just didn’t consider the fact that I would love working for someone else too.
I don’t have more than ten hours a week to work on Slacker Stuff. Unfortunately, between Wednesday’s spiral and today (Friday, as I’m writing), I wasn’t able to figure out how to create a ripple in space-time. I don’t have time to work on longer projects, I don’t have time to do anything on top of what I’m already doing.
Perhaps one day I’ll decide my cup is full, abandon the Monday, Thursday, Saturday schedule I’ve created, and do something else, but I don’t think I’m quite there yet. I know that even when I take breaks from creating, whether it’s filler videos or Substack columns, I end up coming back. I will reach the “what’s the” point again, but I hope I look back at this column to see that it’s going to be okay.
I’m glad you’re here.
Yup, that binary mind trap is a stinker, isn't it?