Be a little flexible with how you get there.

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? So this whole time that I've been creating my course, I've been really hung up on my audio quality, despite the fact that I have made YouTube videos before. I have two podcasts and have generally been pretty comfortable with the audio quality.

[00:00:34] A couple people made some comments and now I simply can't get it out of my head. Which means I've spent a lot of time and maybe a bit more money than necessary trying to solve this issue that is now stuck in my head. In fact, just today I tried rejiggering my doorless office yet again to try to address the issue a little bit. Because my course will have video as well,

[00:01:00] I've been pretty adamant that I don't want my mic to show in the video. I want it out of sight. However, I know that I can achieve far better audio with much less effort if I have the mic very close to me, which inevitably means it'll be in the shot. So I finally decided I was being silly. Lots of folks have the mic showing in their videos, and ultimately the quality of the audio matters far more than whether someone can see my mic or not.

[00:01:31] I mean, everyone knows I'm using a mic. It is not a big deal. At least that's what I keep telling myself - because you see, by being so inflexible with how I wanted to achieve my goal, I was not only creating a lot more work for myself, I was also being a blocker to further work. It's an interesting..

[00:01:55] fascinating and completely ridiculous position to find yourself in: where you are frustrated that you aren't making more progress and frustrated because you yourself are standing in the way of progress. Like we've talked about before a bit, sometimes we do this to ourselves because we're actually procrastinating and I'll admit that there is some truth to that.

[00:02:18] Recording this course feels daunting. While I have certainly gotten better at being on video over the years, I'm still not completely comfortable with it. Something about its permanency and being able to see my own gestures and facial expressions forever recorded is nerve-wracking for me. I know a lot of people hate hearing themselves and I totally get that, but when you edit your own podcasts, you learn to become pretty comfortable with your voice pretty quickly.

[00:02:48] But for some reason, that hasn't translated over the same way for watching myself on video, I don't know. So yeah, there is some productive procrastination happening for sure. Although I'm not actually sure how productive it is, it really just feels expensive. What with the new curtains and rug and brand new mic that I've been trying to get comfortable with for over a month.

[00:03:13] So today I told myself the improvements I've made are good enough and it's time to move on. I can iterate more after the course is done. I set myself a timer for 15 minutes and scripted out the next lesson. Once those 15 minutes had passed, I was in a really good rhythm and it was easy to keep going. Because you see, that's another thing I was being inflexible about.

[00:03:35] I was constantly telling myself that I absolutely needed at least two hours of uninterrupted time to make progress on my course. And that's not wrong, exactly. You do need good chunks of time to do effective deep work, and it's nearly impossible to do all of your work in small amounts of time, but that's not to say you can't get ANY work done in small bits of time.

[00:03:57] By telling myself I'd only work on my course when I had long periods of time to work on it. I was again procrastinating and hindering my own progress. Once again, I was being a blocker for myself. I think it's really important to remember that it's good to have routines, it's really good to have preferences.

[00:04:19] But it's also helpful to sometimes adjust and adapt to the situation at hand because what are you doing if you're not able to move forward? You know? It is important that we be able to keep moving forward, and that's kind of what I've been thinking about today. Don't be so inflexible, Aurooba.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.