Designing a Better System (12 minute read)
Welcome back to the Extant Storytech R&D Report!
There's a business update, a bit about how I'm currently tracking my projects, some wisdom from Lord & Miller, a Yoda of the week, and a request to help with an audio comparison test.
As always, this is not a how-to, it's an ongoing process journal where I talk about the new stuff I'm learning as I create new stuff and navigate a career in show business. Take what works for you, discard the rest.
So, things have ramped up to full speed here over the past few weeks.
After signing with my new managers I sent them two packets of material, a mix of series pitches, feature pitches, short stories, feature specs, and a pitch for a podcast series. I call it "the Covid harvest," but there were a few projects in there from the before times as well.
We talked through all of it together and I asked them what they felt had a better than average shot in the marketplace. They asked me what I was most passionate about which is a much more important question but also a super hard one to answer. I wrote all of them so I love all of them, but I also have this condition where I default to loving the newest thing more.
Of my original stuff we decided to concentrate on the newest series pitch, my GAME OF THRONES style epic about warring factions of public domain characters. There’s an obvious home for this one so that’s the first pitch on the books. My hope is that even if it’s a pass it will show my passion for these characters and how my brain works in putting a show together. Maybe it will get me in the door for something else down the line.
There have been a number of incoming submissions for potential TV jobs over the past few weeks so I’ve been reading a lot of material and fleshing out my takes. I’ve talked a bit about that process before, I’ll circle back to it if I land one of these jobs and feel like I’ve learned something new.
On the feature side, we have two different specs out for reads.
I’ve had a number of general meetings for both film and TV over the past few weeks and this time around I’m determined to do a much better job at keeping track of them. In fact, the pace of the past few weeks has spurred me to rethink my entire system for organizing my projects and meetings in general.
We started production on EXTANT not too long after I broke in and for those two seasons I said no to anything outside of that because I was just holding on by my fingertips while making the show. The busiest period afterward was a couple of months during the summer of 2016 when I was working on the final season of THE STRAIN, pitching REVERIE, pitching a second series (with Robert Zemeckis’s company), as well as a feature based on a short story by George RR Martin. Eventually we got to make REVERIE and I had to pare down to just the show again.
Then the split with the agencies happened, followed by the pandemic. I had overlapping contracts that were spread out over a nearly three years and when I had time in between I was writing my own stuff.
Up this point I haven’t felt like I needed a robust tracking system. I was content to manage things between a loose integration of my notebooks, the notes app on my computer/phone, and the folders on my desktop.
Now I’m juggling multiple incoming submissions, my original pitches, general meetings, producer meetings for my feature spec, and life in general. I kept thinking about this quote from Atomic Habits by James Clear: “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
I have extremely high goals for the next five years.
My current system was inadequate for the task at hand so I spent the past couple of weeks researching ways to redesign it.
Ten years after trying and abandoning Evernote I found myself drawn to it again and it’s already made a huge difference. It's not just giving me peace of mind about keeping track of everything but it's making my creative process a little more efficient and intuitive.
If you’re not familiar with Evernote, here’s a blurb from a website called Zapier.com:
"Evernote is note-taking software that helps you create and organize digital notes—and keeps them synced across all your devices. You can use it as a digital filing cabinet to organize all your notes, whether they're recipes, strategic plans for work, or a daily diary. It's a powerful organizational tool to assist with any number of projects for work or your day-to-day life."
You make “notes” which you can collect in “notebooks,” then you can group those notebooks into related “stacks.”
I made two stacks: Life and Work.
In my Work stack I have a bunch of notebooks: TV, Film, Theater, Podcasts, Books, Short Stories, Newsletter, Workshops/Panels, General Meetings, and a few others.
In my Life stack I have: Health, Finances, Ellie, Personal Accounts, Personal Goals, and a few others.
What I love so far is that I can keep writing in my various physical notebooks during the day and transfer those scribblings to their respective project “notes” in Evernote.
When I get an email about a meeting I can add all of those details to the note for that project. If I take notes by hand during the meeting I can type them in afterward. If I have a general meeting and someone hands me a business card I can snap a picture of it and it will convert it to text. All of this gets indexed and is searchable.
Now I have this second brain but in order to really make it work I have to be committed to using it so I'm building a habit I call "Rundown and Recap."
I’ve started doing a weekly Rundown, either on Sunday night or first thing Monday morning, where I make a plan for the week. I schedule my creative work around any pre-existing meetings and find time to do life stuff, like doctor’s appointments or getting Ellie groomed. Then I do a daily Rundown where I review each day’s schedule and skim through projects in the morning, either while I’m walking Ellie or having breakfast.
The Recap is a short period of time at the end of the day where I collate all of that day’s work into Evernote. I retype my handwritten notes from my journals and copy/paste any relevant links or notes I may have typed into the notes app. I do a weekly Recap end of day on Friday to make sure I haven’t missed anything and to take stock of what I actually accomplished.
Typing this out just now it seems like A LOT but it’s actually not that time consuming. It's added maybe ten to fifteen minutes to my day in terms of the time spent migrating all of my notes there but my suspicion is that it's going to save me time in the long run so I'm not searching through four Moleskine notebooks wondering where the hell I put that one brainstorming session and stuff like that. I can just do a keyword search and it will bring up what I need.
So, quick summary of my experimental new system:
I’m using Evernote to create a note for each project or area of my business. (I’m using the free version but there are paid versions with more features.)
I group those notes into notebooks depending on the type of project, whether it be film, tv, theater, or whatever.
Then I group those notebooks into two stacks for work and life.
I start the week with a Weekly Rundown where I go through all of the projects and make a schedule, then I start each day with a mini-Rundown to remind me of that day’s work.
At the end of every day I do a quick Recap where I migrate all of the stray notes I’ve taken into Evernote and at the end of the week I do a Weekly Recap to make sure I haven’t missed anything and to get that sweet dopamine hit of accomplishment.
Aside from just wanting to be more organized and making sure I don’t drop the ball on anybody, I suspect (hope) there’s a side benefit of added creativity. Offloading some of the right-brain stuff to Evernote should free up some much needed computational power for the fun stuff.
Again, this is all on a trial basis but I can tell you after doing it for a couple of weeks I've seen an enormous benefit. I'm passing it along in case there's something that strikes a chord with you.
Filmmaking Lessons from Lord and Miller
One of the filmmakers behind THE MITCHELLS VS THE MACHINES (which is fantastic, by the way) tweeted out a thread of some of the important stuff he and his partner learned from their producers, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the stone cold geniuses behind shows like LAST MAN ON EARTH and THE AFTERPARTY. So much great information here:
Michael Rianda on Twitter: "What I Learned from Chris Miller + Phil Lord on #TheMitchellsVsTheMachines Lots of ppl asked what I learned from my literal heroes from making a film with them for a year: A TON These are the Top 10 Lessons I learned that I will never forget: Thread🧵 1/??… https://t.co/12YYhYDUW2" — twitter.com “What I Learned from Chris Miller + Phil Lord on #TheMitchellsVsTheMachines Lots of ppl asked what I learned from my literal heroes from making a film with them for a year: A TON These are the Top 10 Lessons I learned that I will never forget: Thread🧵 1/??”
Yoda of the Week - Gang of Youths
Fellow writer and Twitter friend Josh Chesler tagged me in a tweet about the new Gang of Youths record, saying it was right up my alley and he was absolutely right. I've been listening to it obsessively ever since. It took me three days to get past the FIRST TWO TRACKS.
Part of it is the story behind the album itself. The lead singer's father passed away and afterward they discovered a secret family that he'd left behind on a whole other continent years ago. What you're listening to is someone processing that earthquake of an experience and turning it into art that is messy, complex, anthemic, and ultimately, uplifting.
These lyrics from one of my favorite songs on the album have become kind of a mantra the past week:
"So take
A single step at a simple pace
And the outward momentum will maybe un-fuck you in time"
Gang of Youths - the man himself (Live Version) what a blast we had on The Sound playing some of our favourite tracks. Pre-order angel in realtime. here: https://gangofyouths.co/angelinrealtimeCreative Pro...
Could you help us out with an audio split test?
My friends and I are still working on getting our immersive audio storytelling company Vrialto up and running. We are doing a short comparison test with a survey that takes 12-15 minutes to complete.
If you have the time would you mind checking this out and giving us your thoughts? Thank you!
Welcome to our audio split test! Please click the link to complete this form.