Reflections and My Big Secret Project Announcement

For someone who loves to write about time management, I’ve sure had a heck of a time doing it well lately. I started writing this post at exactly 9:07 on Saturday night. I had been working on my big secret project since about 1:00 that afternoon. Let’s pick it up from there…

By the way, I finally announce my project so keep reading!

From Saturday night in a note on my phone (nearly unedited!):

I’m beat. I’m late on delivering it and still have several hours of work left to do. Thankfully it’s only editing, which isn’t bad for me. But I’m beat and I’m taking a break and am reflecting on how I got here.

I took on this job in early January. I was in a good flow and balance with my 9-5, this site and everything else I do. I enjoy juggling as much as I can but then things started happening. Extra work projects, my birthday, weekend trips, etc. and something had to give.

I got off to a solid start but then everything started happening at once. So I pushed off this project. I worked little by little on it but never made huge progress after my initial success. All of a sudden it’s late February and I was hoping to be done at the end of the month. Well it’s March 7th as I write this. I did this to myself. Now I’m chugging espresso and spending my weekend finishing this project.

I know I could have finished it on time but I wasn’t gonna rush it either. This is something I’m proud of, truly. And I hope Tuts+ will let me make many, many more courses for them. Oh yeah, that’s my secret project! I’m making a course called Introduction to Video Editing in Avid Media Composer for Tuts+! And it rocks.

But I have to go finish it now.

Okay, back to today:

There it is, y’all! I’m in the final stages of finishing up my course (I hope to be done tonight…gotta get this post out first!). Then it goes to QC and I’ll fix whatever they need me to. I have no real clue when it’ll be up on Tuts+. I’m assuming around the end of the month? Don’t worry… I’ll be blasting it all over everywhere.

I’d like to circle back to two posts I’ve written here because I feel like they tie into this project very well.

First is, Why I Work For Free…Sometimes. I make the EVF YouTube tutorials for free. Well I get pennies from YouTube (I’m yet to reach the threshold to actually get a check from them and probably never will reach it) so it’s pretty darn close to free. These tutorials were one of the ways Tuts+ found me and then asked me to create courses for them.

That’s where my post called Entrepreneuring Video Editing comes in. I found a way to make money from what I’m doing here with EVF. And that is ridiculously cool to me.

Okay, I have to get going so I can finish up my no longer secret project! You bet I’ll be cracking open a Bell’s Kalamazoo Stout as soon as it’s finished.

Thank you so very much for reading. I’ll see you on Friday with a new tutorial!

PS: I may or may not be working on another big secret project…