As we move forward in 2016 you will see a lot more video from me and fewer long-form blogposts.  As 2015 closed there was a stretch where I’d uploaded 5 videos over 2 weeks. That level of production has never happened over the 5-ish years of this blog. One thing that I noticed:

A blog and a video might both take 6 hours from start to publication but the video has been a clearer path and has proven to be more sustainable.

• BLOG. If you’ve never managed a blog, let me tell you it’s tough because there’s so much stuff moving around. WordPress makes regular updates, plugins have their own updates. Plugins break and sometimes have conflicts with other plugins. Web hosts have problems that cause a site to go down. Sites get hacked, so security is an ongoing issue. Theme authors disappear. HTML tags get deprecated. It can be a mess. I’ve encountered site crashes and spent a lot of time on forums looking for help.

I love writing, but being a webmaster is its own separate job.

• VIDEO. I use Camtasia for screen recording and video editing. The editing part can be tedious, but the process is one that I’ve enjoyed and have gotten comfortable with. It feels more straightforward than dealing with HTML. With video: Record. Edit. Publish. BOOM! On to the next video.

Editing video is its own job, for sure. But it’s not at the level of writing code.

Video has been a fun and fast way to generate content to share knowledge and help people whoop crap data’s ass; help people run their businesses; help people build tools to simplify and automate processes; help people get the most they can from their data.

Check out the shattering glass effect in this video (around 3:50). It drives home the idea that sometimes the intuitive was is the hard way so, we shatter that idea and come up with a more efficient solution.

So, I invite you to send your Excel questions via this blog or via my YouTube channel. I may respond via video.