I don’t have an army of clones like Mr. Atoss, and I do not believe Lisa could consider herself a podcast widow, given my top prioritization of family time. So you might fairly ask (and many of you often do): How the heck do I manage to do all of this??

In an earlier career, I was a software project manager. The only truly valuable thing I took away from that was the concept of time management. There are various formal models and software tools, but none of those work for me; I don’t have the patience or attention for formalized methodologies. I took the part that does work for me and I incorporated into a curriculum that I sometimes teach to small businesspeople looking to become software entrepreneurs in addition to their current business. This means working two jobs at once, something they rarely realize, and rarely take seriously. Generally, they consider their software business to be a sort of side project, and they treat it as a hobby, working on it at odd hours, whenever they happen to find a spot of spare time.

Many podcasters and bloggers treat their project as a hobby as well. The difference between a hobby and a profession is that one is taken seriously, while the other is not. One is an obligation, the other is done at your pleasure. If you work on your podcast or blog whenever you feel like it, whenever it pleases you to do so, whenever some spare time happens to rear its head, you are doing what I call Farting Around. That’s a hobby. I always knew that’s not what I wanted Skeptoid to be.

When I set out to plan my daily schedule, to delineate projects I take seriously from hobby projects, there were four basic items I wanted to accommodate:

1. My full time job. I can’t control the hours I work, basically 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, so this the first thing on my calendar.
2. Being a dad. I only get one shot at this, so I assign it all the time that the kids and are both home. That’s every day after 5pm, and every weekend.
3. The Skeptoid podcast. After the above items, it’s obvious that not a lot of time slots are left. The time slots I found are in the early morning. My Skeptoid day starts at 5:30 in the morning, every day, and ends when the family gets together for breakfast.
4. All of my other projects are hobbies. I work on them whenever I get a chance. There are always short days at work, days off, times when Lisa and the kids are gone, or the kids are out with friends. All my random stuff is done at these odd times.

An exception is the inFact with Brian Dunning video series. This was a purely speculative project, and it required a considerable allocation of resources to do properly. So I talked with my family and we agreed that I would devote a series of Sundays — otherwise family time — to the production, plus two weeknights of editing for each episode. This was acceptable to all of us because it’s a finite project; it’s one season of 13 episodes. If it ultimately proves to be a worthwhile investment and continues, it will replace one or more workdays during the week, and will not affect my other scheduled time. If such a deal can’t be worked, then it’s a deal I won’t make.

I am not moved by the complaints of anyone who tells me they don’t have time for some pet project, but who sets their alarm clock any later than I set mine. If you’re serious about your project, treat it seriously; if you’re not willing to hard code it into your daily schedule, call it what it is: a hobby.

But all of this is only half the issue. Finding the time is one thing, but managing the time once you have it is something else. This is where project management comes in. At a minimum, you must at least delineate the steps and milestones and set deadlines for each. You must be prepared to redline any items you’re not going to have time to complete. The basic steps in a Skeptoid episode are research, writing, editing, recording, audio editing, referencing, posting, and promoting. I know how much time each of the latter steps takes, so sometimes I have to reluctantly cut short the research and writing. I plan for this in advance, and always start with a general outline, and I know what research is going to take the longest. Sometimes I have to make big decisions earlier. For example, the JFK assassination episode is still a long ways off because I know that research has to include reading Vince Bugliosi’s massive book.

So that’s the long answer to the question of how I manage to do everything I do. It’s simply basic time management, and the discipline to stick to a planned schedule. Although, if I could superposition and do multiple things at once, that would be pretty cool.

Why me? Well, the slogan for this year’s conference is Here Be Dragons, and apparently, someone told them that I once made a video of the same name. They must have answered “Good enough for me,” because the next thing I knew I had a plane ticket in my hand. For all they know I could have made a documentary about Komodo. Or Wagnerian characters. Or recursive fractal curves.

They seem to be a fairly skeptical bunch. I’ve spoken with a number of people from the conference and even connected with a few Berlin skeptics, and the word is that nobody in Berlin is religious or believes in any weirdo New Age sheit. In my experience, this means one of two things: Either it’s completely true, or it’s completely false. I find that the people who identify themselves most strongly as skeptics believe only in that which cannot be proven, and passionately hate or distrust anything that can be proven.

This means that there are two probable outcomes to my talk: People will doze after hearing me assert that the sky is blue for the umpteenth time, or they will storm the stage and tear me limb from limb for challenging their cherished belief that an undetectable energy force surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the universe together.

Fortunately, I’m the first session on the last day, when everyone’s either sleeping one off or wishing they were. So it doesn’t really make all that much difference what I talk about. This is good, because if I can avoid bringing my computer and phone, all the better. This is a computer hackers conference, and look at this scary page of all the things you have to do to secure your phone and computer while you’re there. If that’s not enough to dissuade me from making a Keynote presentation that I can deliver from my MacBook, I don’t know what is.

I’m curious to know your thoughts, especially if you’re European, and most especially if you’re German. What are audiences there going to want to hear?

From: Daren Lee <dlee@dleeassociates.com>
Subject: Dragons or Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
Date: October 25, 2009 3:42:18 PM PDT
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Brian, I have seen your video “Here be Dragons” and wow its hilarious. Starts very innocent and common sense like, then takes a deceptive plunge that instinctively makes your palm and face meet. Hitler claims the best lies need a little truth, in your case – common since.

This video, by its definition, is propagandist martial and that is an observable fact. It is evident that you are a person with malicious intent towards society and professor of ignorance. I hope you get run over by a truck carrying copies of the US constitution, wouldn’t that be ironic. But don’t worry Brian, luckily for you we all have the right to live even if were complete fucking douche bags. Just please don’t have kids, we have enough confused, delusional, self righteous earth leeches on this planet.

Sincerely,

Daren R. Lee

The Zeitgeist Movement

But I’m not half as proud as must be “The Zeitgeist Movement”, who are fortunate to have such an insightful and articulate public representative. He manages to artfully limit the number of Hitler references to just one, and raises malapropism to new heights of dual meaning. So congratulations, Mr. Lee. You can pick up your prize from the officer just offstage.

This award is apropos, inasmuch as Zeitgeist (an amazingly paranoid conspiracy theory documentary made for the Internet) helped to inspire Here Be Dragons (my own Internet documentary made to help people see through such nonsense). It’s nice to be able to give something back.

Here Be Dragons

Since the beginning of the Skeptoid podcast, people had been asking me for a video version. Tempting indeed, but having been a college filmmaker and done my share of dabbling, I knew that a weekly video podcast would require far more than the limited time I have available for Skeptoid. So this idea stayed on the back burner for a while.

But I finally got fed up with the amount of uncritical praise and attention given to the garbage conspiracy films Loose Change and Zeitgeist on the Internet, and decided that it was time for a counterattack of reason. So I spent a few months of odd hours putting together my thoughts and writing my own garbage film for the Internet, which I called Here Be Dragons. (I wish I’d picked a different title, because that one’s so common, but heck, I was fresh out of creativity by that point.)

Here Be Dragons was conceived to be a 40 minute (classroom length) video introduction to critical thinking. It’s free of any content that would affect its appropriateness for any school. Most significantly, I wanted it to be absolutely free to everyone. I wrote a 5000 word script that was a distillation of Skeptoid’s general message.

One of the best assets that Skeptoid provides me is an incredible resource of thousands of enthusiastic skeptics eager to help out with any kind of skeptical outreach project. So I temporarily dropped a special announcement and call for help into my Skeptoid feed. I needed artwork, a composer, computer graphics artists, additional “man on the street” video footage, and still photography. Response was huge. I was overwhelmed. Talk about an embarrassment of riches: So many people wanted to help, who brought so much talent and energy to the table. I had to say “Thanks but no thanks” to 95% of everyone who threw their hat into the ring. It was like being a manager during a massive corporate layoff. But I was left with a team that I couldn’t be happier with.

I set aside a few thousand dollars and took two weeks off work. I bought a decent HDV video camera and an almost-good-enough wireless mic. I bought Final Cut Express, learned how badly it was crippled, and bought Final Cut Studio. I then spent two weeks of nonstop production: Driving around, setting up tripods, printing cue cards, replacing broken gear in panic mode, reshooting scenes that didn’t work, sneaking into my orthopod’s office on his day off, earning strange looks from people at the beach, calling in more favors than I can count, getting parking tickets, being chased away by airport security, forgetting meals, employing my whole family for all sorts of odd jobs, and generally enjoying the hell out of life.

Weeks of editing and scoring followed. A week of rendering, ripping, compressing, burning, and web site building followed that. And then, quite suddenly, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, I couldn’t find anything else to do. Here Be Dragons was done.

Like I do for all of my projects, I spend virtually no effort promoting or marketing them. I reason that if they’re good, it’s not necessary, they’ll sell themselves; and if they’re not good, marketing them would be a waste of energy. If my projects find success I want it to be because of their quality, not the quality of their marketing.

People started downloading it (it’s at HereBeDragonsMovie.com). They started making DVD’s. They made foreign language translations. They show it in schools. Two friends have donated huge amounts of time to handle technical issues and get it entered into film festivals. So far, so good.

The most fulfilling part of the experience is the number of teachers I’ve heard from who employ Here Be Dragons. I’ve heard from two different high schools who make it mandatory viewing for all students. I’ve lost count of the number of science and physics and critical thinking teachers who have written to tell me they show it in their class.

Where is Here Be Dragons going to go from here? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what I’d like: I’d like for a proper documentary production company to look at it, find value in its message, give it a budget, and professionally remake it. Will this happen, or perhaps something completely different and unexpected? Only Heisenberg can tell.