I’ve talked at length about treating my adult life as a series of school semesters—it helps my ADHD brain have permission to deep-dive/hyperfocus and also gives me some limits. I choose 2-3 subjects to focus on, for a very loosely assigned time period (roughly between 3-6 months). There is so much flexibility.
When I assign myself learning objectives or assignments, they are very loose, and ultimately, I get to decide if an assignment is actually worth doing.
There aren’t real grades, so I can decide how much effort to devote. But taking the time to formalize and write a syllabus gives me a loose guide and direction if I’m feeling like I don’t know what to do with myself. And it reminds me not to poke my head into too many other “classrooms.”
As I wrote about in my previous post, public brain dump no. 1, this term (roughly, Summer 2026), I want to develop my skills in video editing, among three other subjects. I’ve been feeling a draw to create vlog-like videos. It’s a random tug, and I’m following it to see what happens.
So I did a very meta thing and took a video of the binder I created to contain my syllabi and course work.
I’m teaching myself to edit using trial-and-error and YouTube tutorials. It’s quickly becoming apparent that I have a lot to learn, and that I could spend a long time working on any one video. So I have to cut myself off way before I feel like it’s polished. But, I think I’m making the right choice to just get incrementally better each edit.
In this edit, I focused on:
quickly cutting out “ums” and long pauses, splitting the frame and cutting it out
experimenting with adding b-roll footage
a tiny bit of voiceover
adding titles/captions
a few places where I sped things up
What I’d like to work on next time:
planning out an outline before I record. For this video, I just hit record and went through my binder. After a bit of editing, I found myself wanting to rearrange the footage to make more sense. For example, I talk about my syllabi as a whole a few minutes into talking about the first subject. It’d be better to put that at the front! But when I thought about my limited experience, I was pretty sure it would take added transitions and extra recording to make that change with smooth transitions.
I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to deal with YT vs. Substack. Substack offers the ability to automatically publish to your YT channel—I haven’t chosen to link mine. And I know at least one Substacker who posts initially and directly to YT and then records a short video for Substack to direct people to their YT video.
For those interested in watching in YT, or saving it to a playlist for later viewing, here is my video embedded below:
Please let me know what you think!
I’ve very much open to feedback on what worked and didn’t work for you in this video. Feel free to comment either here or in YouTube. ;) Thank you for your time and your constructive input!
