Matt Ragland is publishing a video every day in February, keeping each to 5-7 minutes with minimal iPad editing. He wants to document his son Kanan, replace his written journal with video, and test a low-effort workflow that keeps editing under 15 minutes per episode.
Chapters
Hey, good morning everyone and welcome. Going live again today. Just like yesterday, I wanted to tell you that if you haven't heard yet, I'm gonna be making a video every day in February. Some of them are gonna be Facebook Live, some of them are gonna just be going straight to YouTube. Everything is gonna be at my YouTube channel. I'm gonna drop it into the comments. I'm gonna be doing a video every day and I'm gonna post it there. There's already 3 videos up. Today is February 1st. February 4th. This is going to go out probably tomorrow, February 5th. But Kanan is napping and I am taking advantage of this. I'm back home in Nashville after a week in Oceanside, California. I believe in Nashville and I'm happy to be home. Why do a video every day? It's something that I've been thinking about for a while. And I really like being on video. If you've taken the Enneagram before, there, it's a selection of like 9 personality traits. I'm a 3. A 3 is the performer. So I just feel once I get used to it, and I've been doing a live video for ConvertKit every week, sometimes multiple per week for the past year and for the past 15 months. So I've done a live video or a live training, oh, you know, over 100 now. And so it's made me feel more and more comfortable about, you know, just being, being live and being okay I'm okay with that. But there was something— there's something— what kept me from doing like these kind of vlogger style videos is that I know how much work goes into them, and having done some like TV production, I mean way back like college, high school, I know how much— I know just a little bit of how much time goes into editing a video, and I just don't have that much time. So that's what's really held me back. Couple things that have pushed me into this right now. I still like being on video. I always watch videos of my son Kanan. You're gonna see him, you'll see him in a bunch of these videos. I love watching videos of him. It's just something different than only watching a, or only seeing a picture. And so I wanted to do more of that with him. I also, in the same way, I wanted to be able to look back and kind of review or audit myself for my own life, for my own work, you know, what I'm doing, what we're going through as a family. I wanted to be able to look back and watch that more than just like read what I've written down because I'm a terrible journaler. I'm just very mediocre at it. But I can get on, yeah, I can get on and I can perform on a video for 5 minutes. So the editing, the editing was an issue. So I thought I thought to myself, and this came from Tim Ferriss and his podcast. One of the things that Tim did was that he asked himself— he had put off doing a podcast for a really long time because again, the editing, you know, how good like most great podcasts sound from a— yeah, just from an audio quality perspective, whether that's Freakonomics or Hardcore History, there's so many of them. But he asked himself, what would it look like if it was easy? And what that looks like for him was to keep it really simple, to not do heavy editing. Of course, yet the quality has to sound good, but in terms of like cutting it up with a bunch of effects and putting in different transitions and making sure you go in and trim out all the ums and ahs, he just decided not to do that. And that really inspired me. Because I don't have time for that. Between working at ConvertKit and trying to be a good father and a good husband, trying to exercise, all of those things are more important to me than making videos. And editing would have been a really big issue with that. My friend John Saddington, you should check out his channel, I'll put it into the description box and in the comments. But he said sometimes he spends an hour or two a day editing, and I don't have that kind of time, or I don't want to spend it on videos. So for me, what would it look like if it was easy? One big thing again is to not worry a ton about the editing, right? So I'm not gonna have— I wouldn't have a ton of clips. It's— some of it is just going to be me talking like this and kind of telling you what the day was like, what the week has been happening. We'll have topics, but it's going to be about 5 to 7 minutes, and it has to be simple enough from an editing perspective that I can just post it right away, or I can edit it on an iPad. Okay, so I just dropped the clip in and I put some titles on it. Maybe I make a cover thumbnail on Canva, but the editing process should not take me more than like 15 minutes. Okay. The other thing that I'm doing for this is that there's not going to be any— I'm not putting any pressure on myself to come up with a specific like channel topic or anything like that. That'll break me down. I just know that'll break me down really quickly. And so I'm not going to put any pressure on myself about that. You're going to see things from me— I left my notebook, I'll go grab my notebook here in a sec— but what you're going to see from me is topics like what it's like to work remotely, especially work remotely with a kid. We're going to talk about some workout routines and morning and evening routines to kind of set your day up for success because to me, one of the most important parts, if not the most important part of waking up early is going to bed earlier. So we're gonna talk about things like that. We're gonna talk a little bit about work at ConvertKit and what we're doing and some of the goals that I have and we have. So really it's, for me, it's just like I've taken a log of, you know, this steady stream of images for my son, images and videos. I love watching the videos. And that's what this is going to be, kind of a log of my work and life. It's going to be a video every day in February to really see, am I enjoying this? Does it have any resonance for anyone watching? And at the end of February, we'll just kind of reassess. But what I could see happening, I don't believe I'll keep doing a daily show. That's just, you know, trying to know myself and my time. Well, I don't believe I'll do a daily show, but I could see doing a weekly show that like drops on Wednesdays or something like that. I could definitely see doing that. So thanks for watching this. Like I said, it's Saturday. This will probably go up on Sunday for YouTube. I've got a like coming home kind of day of video that I'm working on today, or it'll be flipped. This will be published on YouTube today. In fact, that's That's probably what it'll be so I have a little bit more time to edit because this will be the coming home video and hanging out with Kanan. Today will have a little bit, a little bit more editing. So maybe 30 minutes. But yeah, that's the thing that I'm going to be doing. I hope you enjoy watching. Let me know if you have any kind of feedback, things that you'd like to, like any questions you'd like for me to answer about vlogging or work or parenting or exercise, any of those things. We've got a really cool big announcement coming. From our family. Spoiler alert, no one's pregnant, but we are gonna— we're gonna be— we have an announcement that we'll talk about on Monday-ish, sometime next week. All right everyone, have a great weekend, have a great day, and thanks for watching this. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
