For the past 10 years, I’ve been working in post production in Hollywood. I’ve done studio features, TV shows for Apple, and documentaries for Netflix and Amazon.

In my day job, I’ve experienced what it takes to edit at the highest level. Today, I want to share one of the keys to setting yourself up for success: organizing like a pro.

We’ll talk about:

• Why organizing first is a giant time saver
• Understanding how creatives work
• Embracing a structure that makes everything else easier

Words like organizing and structure often make creatives cringe. We think adding limits and boundaries to our work will hamper our creativity. The opposite is, in fact, true. Once you understand the power and benefits of having a properly organized editing project, you’ll be able to skyrocket your editing productivity and unleash your creativity.

Let’s roll.

Organization does not kill creativity

The bigger the project, the more important your organizing skills become. If you’re doing a short piece that you edit in a day or two, you can get away with dumping everything in the project and diving into the timeline.

When you’re cutting a feature film, a strategy like that will suck the creative soul out of your project.

To have a smooth editorial process, you first need to make sure you don’t make a few of the most common mistakes:

• Thinking organization and structure hinders creativity: This mindset is flat-out wrong. If you think this way, change your mind or face the consequences. When you don’t have an easy way of finding what you need, you’ll end up spending hours looking for it.
• Jumping straight into the edit to be as creative as possible: I get it, we all want to get in the timeline and start making creative choices. But if you don’t prep well, you're setting yourself up for failure and headaches later.
• Not having a system: When everything you import goes somewhere randomly it becomes harder to find things. And it's almost impossible to explain to someone else how to navigate your mess.

The reason people tend to make these mistakes is that they’re plagued by a false mindset and overly eager to get to the fun part. As a result, they keep themselves stuck with a messy editing project where they can’t find what they’re looking for and they’re constantly distracted from what actually matters: editing your film.

So, here’s how to fix it:

Why organizing your project saves you 10x the time down the line

I’ll talk mostly about feature films today, but the principles I describe work on tv shows, documentaries, and even smaller editing projects.

The reason we keep all our material neatly organized in post is to maximize creativity.

Yeah, you heard me.

If you’re like me and you edit your own project, you’ve probably felt the consequences of a messy editing project. Assets are scattered in random places, and whenever you’re looking for that one specific thing, you can’t find it to save your life.

When I’m working on bigger projects, we’re a team collaborating in one editing project. Being able to know where things are and how to get around makes everyone’s lives easier.

Whenever I’m assistant editing the number one priority for me is making the editor’s life easier. The first thing I do is get an understanding of how the editor likes to work. Then we find an organizational structure that supports their workflow.

Editors provide the most value to the project when they're editing, making creative choices, and shaping the story.

When the editor is constantly distracted by looking for pieces they need to edit a scene, their work becomes harder.

That’s why I try to remove as much friction as possible for them. That means keeping a structure in the project that’s easy to understand and navigate. We organize scenes in the same way and make sure they all live in the same place. I also make sure any other assets they need are easily accessible.

Having seen how effective this is in my professional day-to-day, I adopted the same approach when editing Wild Boys, even though I didn’t have an assistant.

Back then, I didn’t even know that by splitting my “creative” and “logistical” work, I was helping my brain work better.

But I’ve since learned how to set up my edits to take advantage of my brain’s creative powers.

How creatives work - Maker’s schedule

In his essay “Maker’s schedule, Manager’s schedule” Paul Graham talks about how managers (think producers) and makers (anyone who does creative work) work on completely different schedules. Managers have days filled with meetings, often allocated in one-hour or half-hour blocks. Moving things around is easy for them, and they bounce from meeting to meeting all day.

Makers need a different schedule. When we’re engaged in creative work, the ideal “time block” is anywhere from 90 minutes to four hours. We need time to focus deeply and get into a flow. When we’re constantly interrupted, we break that flow, and it can take 30-60 minutes to get back into it.

Let’s apply this to editing.

Understanding how the creative mind works can help us design a workflow and organizational structure that lets us focus on creative tasks, with as few distractions as possible from other sources.

The first step is blocking external interrupters. Turn off your notifications, get off Twitter, close down Slack, you get it.

One thing I see more and more editors do is not use Slack (or whatever internal messaging tool their team uses) at all. They let their assistants handle communication so they can focus on editing.

This is good.

The second step is to remove distractions inside your editing project. That starts with how you organize your footage, cuts, and other assets.

When the editor knows exactly where to go, and where to find what they need, they can stay in their flow and not have to break it to go down some rabbit hole looking for a sound effect.

So how do we organize our editing projects in Hollywood?

Let me show you.

The system the Hollywood pros use

There’s only one rule: Editors work from top to bottom, assistants work from bottom to top.

What this means is that when an editor opens the project, the first thing they’ll see, at the top of the project is what they are working on. This usually means some kind of cuts or edits folder at the top where they have the sequences they're working on.

After that you’ll probably have a folder with all the scenes, neatly organized how the editor likes them.

From then on, you’ll have folders for sound effects, music, stock footage, graphics, VFX etc. The order varies from project to project. The way I like to think of it is to put the most used material higher up in the project.

For example, if you’re doing a show with lots of VFX you might organize the VFX folder high up. If it’s a show that has tons of music editing, that might be smarter to keep high up.

Towards the bottom of the projects we’ll have everything the assistant is in charge of. I will have a working folder or bin, I’ll put dailies, imports, outputs/exports, turnovers, and anything else the editor doesn’t generally need to worry about down at the bottom.

I also find that this method helps me when I’m solo-editing, like I was on Wild Boys. It helps me keep the maker and the manager separate, even though I’m both people. When I’m editing I want to be able to navigate the project fast and find the pieces I need.

Then when I’m doing more logistical or organizational work I can dive down to the bottom of the project and still keep everything neat and organized, without interfering with the creative work.

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