A Title That Gives Away Your Age
If you understand the title of this article, there’s a good chance one of two things is true:
Either you’re getting letters from AARP, or your parents drove around well into the 2000s with a cassette deck in the dashboard.
No judgment here.
In fact, I currently drive a vehicle that doesn’t even have traditional media controls. If I want music, I need to load files onto a USB thumb drive, format it correctly, and convince the car to recognize it. Technology has a funny way of moving forward while somehow becoming more complicated.
Thinking About Production Before It Was Cool
I’ve been thinking about production workflows long before content creation became a buzzword.
Back before 2000, I was already looking at systems, schedules, and ways to make things work without creating unnecessary headaches. Some of those lessons carried over into websites, video production, blogging, and pretty much every project I’ve touched since.
One of the biggest lessons?
Don’t make every piece of content a fire drill.
The Secret Behind the Curtain
Here’s a little hint for anyone following the site.
Look at the timestamp on a post.
If it appears around four o’clock in the morning, there’s a very good chance it was scheduled ahead of time.
Why?
Because I’m usually asleep at that hour.
If I’m awake, it’s probably because my digestive system has decided to file a formal complaint and completely rearrange my plans for the day.
Either way, chances are I wasn’t sitting at a keyboard at four in the morning carefully publishing articles.
Production Isn’t Magic
One of the realities of running a website, producing videos, writing articles, and maintaining everything else is that there is only one person doing the work.
Me.
Scheduling content isn’t some mysterious trick. It’s a practical production tool.
I can spend a productive day creating several pieces of content, schedule them for future release, and then focus on other responsibilities instead of scrambling to produce something every single day.
That keeps the site active without turning content creation into a full-time panic attack.
The One-Man Band Problem
Running a site isn’t just about creating content.
There’s hosting to pay for.
Equipment to maintain.
Videos to edit.
Articles to write.
Technical issues to fix.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, I still have to earn a living.
Scheduling content allows me to spread the workload out so I can continue producing material without overwhelming myself.
The goal isn’t to flood the site with content.
The goal is consistency.
Random Thoughts and Gas Prices
Most of what appears here starts as a random thought.
Sometimes it’s production.
Sometimes it’s technology.
Sometimes it’s observations from the road.
Sometimes it’s me looking at something everyone is arguing about and wondering if they’re missing the bigger picture.
Take gas prices.
I always tell people not to get emotionally attached to the price of a commodity. Commodities go up. Commodities go down. Over time, they generally trend upward.
I also remember people complaining about gas prices in the early 2000s, and somehow we’re still having the exact same arguments decades later.
Of course, whenever somebody brings up California, all bets are off. California occasionally looks at reality, nods politely, and then proceeds to do its own thing anyway.
The Real Point
The real point is that production isn’t always happening when you think it is.
A post that appears today may have been written yesterday.
A video released this week may have been planned weeks ago.
An idea might have been sitting in a notebook, a text file, or the back of my head for years before it finally made its way onto the website.
So if you ever wonder whether something was posted live or scheduled in advance, the answer is simple:
Sometimes it’s live.
Sometimes it’s Memorex.