Roadblock of Procrastination Conquered

I've been battling that ever present ball and chain of procrastination in dealing with finishing the garage clean out. Something that shouldn't take more than a few hours to just go through and take care of. Every time I went out into the garage and stared at the relatively small pile of disorganization, the nagging brainwork would eat through and win the battle of "we can tackle this tomorrow, or next weekend."

That had been the case over the past month or so, until this weekend when I buckled down, grabbed those thoughts, and said not today. There was also another reason for putting things off so long. I had planned on documenting the process for the Maker Dad YouTube channel, since the channel and even this site are mainly about my journey in getting things up and running.

So this past Sunday morning, after getting some breakfast, I went straight to work on getting the garage organized. I knew it would take longer than usual since I wanted to set up camera locations for what I felt were decent shots.

Digging Into the Process

Even before I started, I had somewhat of a game plan for how I wanted to get the majority of the storage totes organized. It helped that we had consolidated a lot of our stuff by taking part in a community yard sale a couple of months ago. It's really not surprising how easily and how quickly one can acquire things.

I think many Americans, and people in general, gather things they believe they'll use, but end up using once for whatever project they had in mind, and then the item spends the next several months to years sitting around collecting dust. That was my situation before the yard sale. There were a lot of things I had purchased years ago thinking I would love to have them for doing general projects around the house. Jack stands with the accompanying jack for lifting your car, for example. My thinking was that I would use these to do my own oil changes or other simple car maintenance tasks since I have access to a two car garage. Fast forward several years and I never once used them. They just sat on a shelf taking up space.

Those and many other items shared the same story. I decided I needed to go through everything and purge a lot of it. Let those things live elsewhere, for someone else to think about using, or maybe even actually use.

Dynamic Planning

Before I started the cleanup, I had a game plan for filming the different shots for the video, going as far as mapping out different b-roll shots I was thinking of. Of course that didn't pan out, as it seems my overall style and approach to creating these videos is more of a run and gun style.

During the entire process I was rolling through potential voiceover changes for each scene, and that was constantly shifting when you're in the middle of cleaning and trying to stay in frame. Having a general outline for the video did help a lot though, and kept me focused on what I was doing during those few hours.

Everything Worked Out For the Best

At the end of the day, I had finished the task, filmed enough material for what I imagined to be about ten minutes or so, and had a garage that was cleared out. More than enough to actually park our car inside.

Another step in getting past the procrastination roadblock was gathering all of the footage and working on editing things down. My original idea was to overlay a soft music bed and record a voiceover to the video. After getting things cut down though, a different idea hit me.

Let's experiment with something different. There is this niche of videos where there is no background music, no voiceovers, or even talking head segments. The video is just the action of the person working on the project, and the only audio is the sound of the work itself. Could you call it laziness for not wanting to go through all that extra work? Maybe. But for me it's more about the fact that everything I'm doing right now is an experiment. Trying out new avenues. Trying different things from what I've been doing for the past many years.

Looking Back

If there is one thing this whole experience reinforced, it's that the weight of putting something off almost always turns out to be heavier than the task itself. A few hours of actual work had been stretched out into weeks of mental back and forth, and for what? The garage is clean, the video is done, and it feels good.

There is also something to be said about letting go of the rigid plan and just moving forward. The shots I envisioned, the voiceover I had scripted in my head, the music bed I thought would tie it all together, none of that made the final cut. What did make it was just an honest look at the process of someone getting things done. And maybe that's the whole point of what Maker Dad is turning into. Not a polished production, but a real one.

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