Priority & Perfection: Our Two Biggest Obstacles in the New Year

Why we didn’t blog as much as we would have liked in 2012 and what we’re doing about it.

As I reflect on 2011, I think about all of the adventures Kevin and I shared together as we sold our possessions, moved into an RV and trekked across the United States in search of a lifestyle that many dream of, yet rarely achieve. We were ambitious and optimistic about our travels. We planned to serve our clients 3-4 days per week, visit parks, monuments and other sites 2-3 days per week, and pack up, drive and set up camp in a new location 1 day per week. All while documenting everything and telling our story through video blogs, photographs and stories. AMBITIOUS INDEED!

Our actual experience was a lot different than we expected. We ended up working more and moving around less, and spending more time with friends and family than we did sightseeing. We still had a wonderful experience on the road, but we didn’t get to blog as much as we would have liked.

Here is a list of our lame excuses:

Processing Power – Kevin and I both use our computers for work, so during the day we can’t use them for processing our videos and preparing them for editing. The little time we did have to process video on the road was insignificant when compared to the volume of video we have.

Internet Connection – While on the road we were always moving around, so our Internet connection and speeds were always changing. Sometimes, we couldn’t upload videos to our website because we didn’t have enough bandwidth, or we just didn’t have enough data usage left on our 3G service.

Opportunity Cost – When it came down to it, when given the choice to explore Parliament in Canada or sit in the RV and edit video we would always choose to explore Parliament, go white water rafting, or whatever the activity was at the time. We drove over 7,500 miles so we wanted to get the most out of our time in a given place, and that meant forgoing editing.

RV Set-Up and Tear-Down – It is a lot of work to live in an RV – I just don’t know how you retired folk do it. Maybe it’s because we didn’t have a super-duper fancy diesel pusher, but it seemed we spent hours setting up and tearing down the camper to move from one location to the next. As a result, this cut in to our time to explore the sites and edit videos.

Unexpected Maintenance Issues – They make for a good story, but they certainly don’t allow extra time for editing videos. While on the road we had to replace the torque converter, fix a leaky sink, reconstruct two closets, and more. Sometimes these things took Kevin multiple days to fix, further reducing his time to work on videos.

In a perfect world we would have had a brand new RV with little to no issues, an entire room dedicated to producing videos with a huge satellite on top; plus several sponsors sending monthly advertising dollars and a camera crew on board to film and edit videos for us. We wouldn’t have to work so we could dedicate all of our time to exploring destinations and brainstorming new ways to tell our story.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. We’ve realized that if we are going to make this happen and tell our story there are two things that we need to do:

1. We need to make our story a priority. It hasn’t been on the top of our list, and for that we are sorry. In 2012, we are going to set aside time each week to blog.
2. We need to stop worrying about perfection. In our minds we have had this idea that our blog would be in chronological order, with perfectly edited videos, etc. Instead, we fell victim to “perfection paralysis” and did nothing. So, in 2012 we’re going to produce content each week – regardless of how perfect it is.

We are also working on fixing some of the issues we’ve had in the past. For example, we are buying a third computer that will be dedicated to processing video for us and we’re working on some more equipment that should make workflow much easier.

We thank you for sticking with us on this adventure and do hope that you will stay tuned. We have lots of great stories to come from our time on the road, and we will be setting out on new adventures in the Spring of 2012. In an effort to stay organized we will create different sections on the website so you can follow us in real time, yet still explore our videos from past adventures.

We hope you will stay tuned.