When More Was Definitely Not Better

I remember when the audio editing for Ready for the Quest got really hard.

I was trying to work it like I did the writing: get up earlier than my fears did, attack the work with intense energy, pushing with all my might. I was testing to see how MUCH I could accomplish in a day.

It didn't work.

Editing the audio was a different beast. And the fact that the voice on the tape was MINE added additional friction. Back (in the day) when I thought I might be an actor, I studied enough vocal technique to learn that the way my voice sounds to me is very different from how it sounds to the rest of the world. There's all this business of resonance and your bones and tissues conducting sound in ways that other people can't hear. The very physicality of how you interact with sound waves is different. And then - if you capture the sound on a microphone and transfer it to a digital recording device the sound gets changed every step along the way. Then you play it back on your computer, which further alters it, and even the headphones you choose can radically alter what you're hearing. Yikes!

And so – when you hear a recording of your voice it can be downright mystifying. Off-putting, even. It reminds me of the uncanny valley effect, and I was spending hours a day in that uncanny audio valley. It was not comfortable, and I would get fatigued rather quickly. I'm told your ears get fatigued, too, when you're doing hours of audio work.

The editing work was both creative (re-arranging the pieces, re-writing on the fly) and technical (listening for the best takes, eliminating audio issues) and I was not used to getting worn out so quickly. Compared to the writing phase, the editing process required much more frequent breaks and shorter work sessions overall.

Actually, as I think about it now, I'm realizing that I must've been dealing with the challenges of "desirable difficulty." When I was just writing, I could sink deep into hyperfocus – it's one of the gifts of ADHD. When things were going well I could easily write for six hours without a break. (Ask my wife how often I'd put lunch in the microwave and then forget to eat it.) But with desirable difficulty, you intentionally avoid getting into a groove. It's awkward, uneven, and clunky. The challenge level is too high to slip into a flow state. However - you're probably learning more, which is why it might be desirable.

So – there I was, facing down that awkward kind of work, made a bit more clumsy and tense by the fact that it was my own voice I was paying such close attention to, which triggered an extra dose of scrutiny. It was exhausting! And I was frustrated about that fact, which was only made it worse.

I had to re-design my practice for this new kind of work. I had to change the measures of success. How MUCH I got done in a day was no longer a good fit. If I'd kept measuring by quantity, I would have crashed and burned and the quality would have taken a nose-dive. So I started focusing on quality in short sprints. I found that I could do really high quality work for about 2.5 hours before my focus sharply fell off.

For that stage of the process, 2.5 hours of editing became a rep – that was my unit of measurement. I'd see how many high quality reps I could fit into a week. I even had a friend texting me on Fridays so I could report the number of reps I'd accumulated.

It definitely tested my patience. It took more hours and many more weeks than I'd (perhaps foolishly) hoped it would. But after experimenting with it, I saw that I was making more and better progress than I had with the "more is better" approach. And the constant whir of exasperation was gone.

Of course, that was actually the 2nd time I'd had to redesign my audiobook-making practice. The first time was when I started recording the damned thing – but that's a whole other, much longer story, maybe for another time.

Ready for the Quest

An audiobook art project and a practical guide to taking action, doing hard things, and pursuing what matters most.

Coach Matt SlaybaughCoach Matt Slaybaugh