2023-06-30 – Day 12
The Reality of Building a Course: An Update on My Journey
A few days behind with a text check-in and a couple more for video. I promised a real-life daily look at building a course, but it has turned into an opportunity to discuss the many pitfalls of project planning with ADHD. Whimsical decision-making, shortsighted time estimates, life’s many distractions (in my case, travel, and managing several ongoing contracts), and the occasional combination of both overestimating my skills while underestimating new challenges (like producing video content).
I decided to take on this challenge to push myself out of my comfort zone and test my limits. It worked!
Reflections on Day 12
It’s day 12, and I know that although I have a lot of work left to do on the actual course building, I have managed to make a lot more headway since my decision to dial back the social interactions. Video was the first to go. It’s a high-bandwidth activity for me at this point, consuming a lot of energy in a number of ways.
Anyone that says producing video content is easy has something else going for them. Either they are already experienced with editing, pre-script their content, and don’t rely heavily on editing, or a combination of the above.
My Video Production Challenges
I am not experienced with either (although, I guess I am more experienced now), and one of the big issues I ran into was thinking that I could just record a monologue, and then edit it later. This is far more time-consuming than one might expect. That leaves me with recording a few takes in order to find one that works. I can confidently say that’s a very inefficient method as well.
Knowing your editing tools well helps a lot too. I was learning Descript on the go for those first few videos, and while it’s fairly straightforward, it’s hard to walk yourself back out of a complicated situation if something goes wrong. Frequently revisiting the documentation and forums for seemingly small things is frustrating. Each 10 minutes can feel like an eternity, just knowing that I could be making progress on the things that I’m actually good at.
Decisions and Adjustments
Ultimately, I decided that this is too lengthy of a process to continue daily, while also building a course, traveling, and actively discussing the course content with people on social media. For now, I will keep the video check-ins to a minimum in order to maximize the amount of time I have to spend creating the course content.
This part of the experiment, however, has been enlightening. I will definitely challenge myself to another round of daily video check-ins once I have a significant amount more experience with recording video in general.
So, from tomorrow (day 13), until August 1 (day 44), I will be continuing with Twitter updates, and the occasional video might make an appearance here and there.
Now, for the Course Updates!
I have a new landing page that I’m almost finished. I built it out using Carrd because Super.so wasn’t the best tool for the job where it is currently, and spinning up a whole WordPress site seemed like major overkill at this point. It’s a course, not an entire brand.
While there are many other ways I could have approached this, I found that Carrd had the right balance of features to cost. This was one new tool that didn’t take much learning to get working the way I wanted it to.
Building the Pre-registration Form
I’ve also built the majority of the pre-registration form using Paperform. It’s simple to use and has all of the nice integration features you would expectfrom a pro form builder. The pre-registration form is a great way for users to get specific about their pain-points. This benefits the overall course creation, and will also allow me to curate some specific reference materials for each individual participant.
I know that everyone has differing preferences when it comes to their workflows, especially regarding the software they rely on to drive things.
Writing the Course Content
I’ve been working on writing up some of the more generic course content that will apply to the majority of participants. I intend to start sharing some of these in-depth workflows leading up to the launch of the course.
The one I’ve got planned for next week is all about minimizing stress and overwhelm regarding emails. It’s a topic that I am all too familiar with, and you can be sure that it’s been thoughtfully written from a place of compassion and understanding.
Final Thoughts and Looking Ahead
I’ve just spent a couple of days documenting my regular monthly review process and have taken some much-needed time to refine it, since I missed my last review date and have been suffering the consequences (read, had a very full inbox).
Can’t wait to share the next update with you! Until then, stay inspired and keep pushing your boundaries!