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AP’s Productivity Playbook: Resources and Inspiration

November 23, 2023

This post is part of a 6 article series about productivity.

If you’re confused right now about reading this in the blog of a VFX artist, I’d recommend that you start from the introduction. Otherwise, here’s all the articles in order, in case you’d like to jump to any specific part once they’re all available. I hope you enjoy!

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

Productivity Resources

Here’s a short list with some of the resources that have had the most impact in shaping the way I think about the topic of productivity today.

“Productive with a purpose” blog

This blog is the journey of another individual, who has some incredibly insightful thoughts on what being productive means and how one can go about it.

Some posts I especially loved to read:

Todoist Articles

Todoist is one of the leading and most complete task management apps, and while it’s not the one I personally use, their blog is amazing and thoroughly explains some of the main productivity systems. They even have a quiz to help you find the ones that could be the most useful to you.

Here’s two articles, for example, that were like diamonds for me:

Zen of Python

This Bible of Python’s design guiding principles, which is written down as 19 aphorisms, is something I reference back to in so many different contexts. I show it to my VFX students as an example of a working philosophy that you can apply to your work and not only within Python or programming. If you didn’t know about it, I’d invite you to read it and reflect on each point and if/how it could apply to your particular task at hand.

AP’s Productivity Playbook: Weapons of Choice II

November 11, 2023

This post is part of a 6 article series about productivity.

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

In the previous part I talked about the digital apps that are the most central to my personal productivity ecosystem (as of the date of writing this article!!)… my Weapons of Choice for taking notes and managing tasks, or ToDos. That’s the section where most of the heavy-lifting happens, so it came out pretty detailed.

However, there’s another suite of tools that are a core part of my personal “operating system” and are equally important, while falling outside the notes and tasks: those for time scheduling, automations, or just peace of mind.

Let’s dive into my favourites!

Google Calendar

I manage all my events inside Google Calendar, and that works totally fine for me.

Even while being a pretty heavy calendar abuser, with my Head of VFX role alone involving more than 10-15 meetings some days.

Why I use it:

I feel Google Calendar is a fantastic option for managing multiple calendars, and the iPhone app is able to show me the company’s calendar, my personal ones and even the university calendar (which is based on Microsoft Outlook) in the same view, with different colours, and seamlessly create and modify events for all of them.

It’s probably not an app for everyone, as people with teams that manage their times or with clients that can chip in and schedule meetings at any time might benefit from alternative calendars with more automations.

However, as you see I’m generally in control of my own schedule and normally don’t allow for many external inputs outside the designated time slots, so Google Cal just works fine for me.

AP’s Productivity Playbook: Weapons of Choice I

November 1, 2023

This post is part of a 6 article series about productivity.

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

In this part I’ll move on to start covering the actual tools that I use for productivity. This might be the most personal set of decisions from the whole topic, as luckily there’s thousands of amazing software and hardware on the market, and each person will gravitate towards a unique set of characteristics in the tools they decide (and get) to use.

As I mentioned before, I love simplicity, efficiency and beauty. And I also love technology and automation in equal measure, so this probably transpires into the exact setup that I ended up easing into.

Your setup can look completely different and still be what best contributes to your own productivity, so please just take this as another person’s cherrypicked tools at a specific moment in time, and at most as an example of details you could consider when planning what works for your own system.

By the way, I have zero financial incentive for any of this, as it’s just a raw collection of my thoughts, as usual. Ok, without further ado, let’s talk about some tools!

"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."

Han Solo

(Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope)

Things 3

Things is my task manager of choice. It is a clean and really beautiful (but Apple-only) app for task capturing and all task management.

Why I use it:

What I love about Things is that while being really powerful under the hood, it just sticks to the basics.

It lacks features that some productivity aficionados might miss, such as collaboration options, location-based reminders, image embedding or sub-areas. However this also brings an added simplicity and sense of “just use it for what it is” that I surprisingly find quite freeing. Helps not to clutter your possibilities and make the most out of the basic features it has. And what it does, it does in such a beautiful and simple way! The animations, typography, and UX in general is so smooth that at least for me it makes such a pleasant experience to add tasks, move them around and mark them as done, which if you think about it is 90% of what it all boils down to.

AP’s Productivity Playbook: The Processes

October 23, 2023

This post is part of a 6 article series about productivity.

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

After discussing what productivity means (or might mean for you) and showing my top tips for setting up your own system —or at least the ones that I’d tell to my younger self—, I’ll now discuss the processes and rituals that have most influenced my current habits. Not that they’re the best and I’m sure they’ll change through time, but definitely big contributors to my own system.

If any of this resonates with you or informs any decisions, then I’m already happy!

Time blocking and Task Batching

Time blocking is by far the time management method that most helps me, reducing context switching fatigue/overhead to the minimum. I believe we tend to greatly underestimate how much energy will be drained away from us every time we need to switch from one task to another. So I always do my best to group any tasks that are related to the same topic or require a similar mental and/or physical state, and then do them right after each other. Here’s the main ideas:

1. 📬 Batch emails at very specific timeframes.

I learned this from Tim Ferriss and it changed my life. No one will die (most probably) if you don’t check and reply emails every single minute. And doing it all in a batch will help you focus your attention just once and get done with it.

Bonus tip: This allows me to go out and write them in the Sun, hitting two targets at once, while the Sun even gives me some useful energy for the email-writing mood!

2. 🧘 Long periods for Focus Time without interruptions.

I set chunks of time for deep or creative work every single day, probably far longer than most normal people should but I really need this because of how I am, and took long to understand the big impact this has on me.

Bonus tip: I literally have a task named Focus Time scheduled on my work calendar so that everyone can see it and be aware of the parts of the day when I can’t have any meetings and I won’t reply to emails or chats.

AP’s Productivity Playbook: The Mindset

October 19, 2023

This post is part of a 6 article series about productivity.

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

"Oh, isn’t it a hard word to define."

We’ve now established (myself through the hard way) that productivity isn’t just about doing more… instead, it’s really about doing more of what matters, and this is the most important realisation I always try to remember.

From the trillions of ways there might be to define what productivity means, these two are the closest to what comes up when I now think about it now:

"Where Action meets Purpose"

"An alignment of focus and priorities."

Distilling the central takeaway from from all this (or if I could only send one quick message to my younger self…), it would be:

Focus on what matters. If you only do the most important thing, it’s not only acceptable but it’s a success. And in order to do it, start by carefully deciding what matters.

These two really distinct processes are what some people refer to as Blue work and Red work, or planning and executing, and I’ve found that allocating specific time to each of the two processes has been the strongest catalyst for my sense of productive fulfilment.

Tips for setting up a Productivity System

Here’s some random thoughts I would love to have interiorised as foundations long ago, before starting to fiddle around with my own tools and systems:

AP’s Productivity Playbook: Introduction

October 15, 2023

This is the introduction to my 6 article series about productivity.

If you’re confused right now about why exactly you’re reading this in the blog of a VFX artist, this is the part in which you can learn the context and motivations. For the rest, feel free to read them in order or jump straight to whichever part you’re most interested in, as soon as they’re out. I hope you enjoy!

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

Preface: "Brute force productivity"

One question I get a lot is “How do you get the time to…?”, as I probably seem to be juggling quite a few responsibilities at once, such as my full-time VFX job, the mentoring groups, tool development, directing and teaching in a masters degree, a blog, a podcast or the online courses. And while the harsh reality is that at this stage this is mostly due to the amount of priorities and interests in my life being madly reduced compared to a normal human being (which allows for most of my time and energy to concentrate on a pretty teeny subset of reality, maybe giving the wrong impression that I’m somehow able to pour that same level of energy into other areas…), productivity also happens to be a topic that has me really intrigued, and both learning about it and making concrete actions towards changing my own system has really had a profound effect on how I operate today.

After so long trying to navigate the overwhelming amount of information online, and far from considering myself any expert, I do feel I’ve arrived at a set of thoughts and practices that, while still evolving, I feel are worth sharing in this moment in case they can help others in a similar crunch.

Started a podcast.

July 5, 2023

Looks like we’ve started a new VFX podcast! One of those random things that if you’re not careful can very easily spawn from a “why not” at any given time.

OK but why.

After some months back I took part in a Foundry Livestream with my good friends Tony and Josh, which I mentioned in the last post, we all felt that time had gone by really quickly and we had had a lot of fun. So we all said “man we should do more of this, even just by ourselves”. And that was the Why Not moment right there.

Josh and Tony’s friend Gautama Murcho, or “G”, came along and we four scheduled and recorded a random zoom call. And oh, it was fun. G is amazing, great artist and supervisor who I literally met in that improvised conversation. And yes, his real name is a single letter like the true masters – you can watch the episode to understand.

So here we are, The VFX Nomads. And we even have a logo. And a .com domain and YouTube and Spotify, isn’t that pro!

On teaching VFX, and anything else really.

June 8, 2023

“Aren’t you afraid of teaching everything you know about a subject?"

This is a question I never managed to make sense of – like… what?? I wish I could help others to know more than I do, not less!! What gives you value and purpose as a human being? Making others around you better, happier and smarter, or patting yourself on the back in some conception of a zero-sum universe?

Rephrasing this question however, we can turn it into a really fun one:

Is it possible to teach all you know about a subject?

Now this is a fascinating topic. Because in order to answer this question, you also need to explore how exactly one’s understanding about a topic develops.

I recently took part in a Foundry livestream on their YouTube channel with my awesome colleagues Tony Lyons and Josh Parks, and among other things we touched on this topic of sharing your knowledge with others. And while “briefly” gathering my thoughts, I ended up writing down a lot more than expected and elaborating properly, so it turned into this post!

You can watch the livestream here, or keep reading for some of my random thoughts on teaching.

The Creation of OpenVPCal

November 10, 2022

There’s times that you start a project planning to complete it in a few days, and it takes a bit longer. Well, I’m here to talk about one where “a bit longer” turned into 2+ years. And for this I’m blaming the amazing people that I was able to develop it with. So here’s the story of OpenVPCal…

OpenVPCal is an open-source Screen-to-Camera color calibration tool for virtual production (In-Camera VFX) that I’ve been developing for the best part of the last 2 years alongside with Francesco Luigi Giardiello, an Imaging Technologist from Netflix and amazing color scientist, as well as his team, plus a whole lot of input from many other people.

OpenVPCal is now (writing this on November 2022) in beta state and already being tested by 40+ partners around the world. The tool was presented in Siggraph 2022 by Carol Payne and Francesco ¹, and we also made a presentation of the tool on Netflix Post Production Summit 2022 in Madrid, last week.

Here’s my latest big dev project… this website

May 29, 2022

It took me so many years to go ahead and make a blog… then I made one in 2016, and as soon as it was working I didn’t quite feel like writing anything. So that was the end of such futile effort. Fun thing to build though.

Fast forward to 2021, after having redirected my digital compositor career more towards supervision, education and development, it was the moment to start building something new. Except for the fact that those occupations combined take like every single waking hour I have. So getting a new website creation into my to-do list (which tends to only be inhabited by vfx tools) wasn’t the smartest of possible decisions. Especially given my most-probably-pathological and definitely unhealthy perseveration for any stuff that goes into that list. Nonetheless it got there. And that’s not even the worst part: a blog also got its way into the list. And a newsletter. And… an online learning platform. Not sure how I let the guard down but it was already too late.

Now – good news is if you’re reading this, I’m potentially still alive and made it to the other side of that part of my to-do list. So welcome to my blog, website, and little online learning platform!

AP’s Productivity Playbook: Resources and Inspiration

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

Productivity Resources

“Productive with a purpose” blog

Todoist Articles

Zen of Python

AP’s Productivity Playbook: Weapons of Choice II

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

Google Calendar

Why I use it:

AP’s Productivity Playbook: Weapons of Choice I

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

Things 3

Why I use it:

AP’s Productivity Playbook: The Processes

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

Time blocking and Task Batching

1. 📬 Batch emails at very specific timeframes.

2. 🧘 Long periods for Focus Time without interruptions.

AP’s Productivity Playbook: The Mindset

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

"Oh, isn’t it a hard word to define."

Tips for setting up a Productivity System

AP’s Productivity Playbook: Introduction

📙 AP’s Productivity Playbook Series:

Preface: "Brute force productivity"

Started a podcast.

OK but why.

The Creation of OpenVPCal

Here’s my latest big dev project… this website

Join my Newsletter

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