Dateline 5-12-2017

Yesterday was my first day back to my regular schedule after finally getting caught up on some behind the scenes work that piled up for two weeks due to obligations and delays that I promised I wouldn't talk about anymore because I need to treat these posts like they are letters to the same no one that doesn't require daily refreshers as to what I am talking about. 

Anyways, my plan was to do the bare minimum to celebrate the fact that I finally got caught up, only I accidentally managed to get myself ahead for the day thanks to how mundane the current lineup of hosts are for the season of SNL that I'm currently watching. 

You see, before each viewing, I create a template of sorts by snagging the image of the host as they do their monolog to create a thumbnail image and then also snag the last artistic image of the host that the flash at the end of the episode which I use in my introductory statement.

Next, I have a site that I reference that lists every sketch that appears in each episode. I try to avoid reading the description as I copy the list of sketch titles into my Wicker Breakdown. Though I would prefer to go into a viewing completely blind, prepopulating the list of titles allows me to watch the episode without taking as many notes because unless I have specific insights the title is enough of a reminder for me to come up with a summary.

I also now need this list because ever since I finished watching the first five seasons with the original cast, all the episodes on the service I use are abridged because they cut out all of the sketches with any form of licensing issue. This means that I have to Frankenstein my viewing to make it complete so this list is required for finding the non-included sketches that I have to track down.

This process isn't all that hard and doesn't take all that long but it is so monotonous that it often takes me a little while to get myself into the right mood. Well, yesterday's show was hosted by James Coburn and today's is Bruce Dern who are both actors that I am barely familiar with and somehow I ended up clicking on the wrong list.

It actually ended up being pretty funny because these abridged episodes don't always start with sketch number one, so when the show fired up and the first sketch started, I couldn't find anything on the list that was even close to a fit because it turned out I was a day ahead. Thought this was a little frustrating at first, I was pretty pleased when I realized that this wasn't all for not because it means that I've already gotten my leg work done for today!!!

This is awesome for a couple reasons, for one, the obvious reason is that it's going to make my blogging obligations much lighter for the day, but also it's given me an idea of how I can get ahead of the game by creating more of these templates without even watching the show. This will allow me to have something to work on while I listen to podcasts and have free time but don't really want to work on anything that is too involved.

 This new strategy would work perfectly for me because the main reason that I have a hard time reviewing multiple shows in a day, in my attempt to create a stockpile, is the constant jumping back and forth between different types of tasks as well as different forms of entertainment.

Often times, I'll fire up a podcast to listen to as I do the preshow legwork, only to get so caught up in what I'm listening to that I have to wait until it's over before I can get to my viewing. Though I do work on other projects during this window of time, I could probably knock out five of these templates in the time it would take to listen to a standard episode. This should make me ten times more productive.

I don't really think that I'm going to get to much of this today as I plan to use this weekend to prepare for a fresh start on Monday. Today's focus is going to be cleaning my place because that's another area of my life that has been neglected for weeks and it's getting to the point where it's affecting my ability to relax.

As always, we'll see what I get to and I check in tomorrow with an update.

Talk to you then,

The Wicker Breaker