Yesterday marked the 5th time that I have sat down to my computer and proceeded to talk into it for multiple hours in an attempt to get a clear and concise video in which I try to a) not look like a total goober, b) add value to the Tableau community, and c) do it in 2 minutes. It has been a month and a half since I challenged myself to create a two-minute video tutorial every Tuesday and I have learned some valuable lessons in that time. If you are considering doing something similar, here are a few things that I've learned so far:
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Lesson 1: Two minutes is not a lot of time.
I arbitrarily chose this number. I knew that I wanted the videos to be short, but I chose two minutes primarily because the number two started with a T (which for some reason has emerged as a theme when I am in charge of naming things). Getting an intro, a topic summary, a statement about why it matters, a step-by-step how-to, and a conclusion all crammed into two minutes is a challenge in itself. Increasing my time limit would actually decrease the amount of time it takes me to complete each video. Lesson 2: Outlines are gold. The first couple of weeks I had a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants approach to filming. I decided what my topic would be, which dashboard I would use as an example (and in some cases this meant creating a new one), and generally what I wanted to say. This resulted fairly consistently in multiple hours of filming myself stumbling over my words while trying to figure out how exactly to say what I wanted to say. Now I use a much more strategic approach where I outline exactly what I want to touch on in the two minutes. Not only does it take less time to reach a final product, I think it is a clearer and the quality is better. The downside: the outtakes aren't nearly as entertaining. Lesson 3: Rush it a little. Like many people, I am my own harshest critic. I could film and re-film forever and still feel there was room for improvement. I did an experiment on week three where I decided to film on Monday so that I wouldn't feel as rushed. Bad idea. The more time I have, the more time I will spend on unnecessary iterations. I quickly returned to scripting, filming, and publishing on Tuesday mornings to keep a limit on the amount of time I spend. Lesson 4: Start with a dance. Different people have different ways of pumping themselves up. Most people know that I am a Zumba Fitness instructor-- so for me it's all about putting on Despacito and my dancing shoes. You may think I'm joking here, but I have found that getting up and doing a few spins right before filming results in a more energetic, genuine, and engaging video. Going to film something? Get up out of your chair and do whatever gets you going first. Lesson 5: Love it and leave it on social. Publishing a video of yourself can be a vulnerable experience. The first couple of weeks, I found myself refreshing my social media sites nearly non-stop to see if there were new comments or likes..or dislikes. I now have a rule that after I publish, I have to accept that I am opening myself up to whatever response or feedback may follow and I'm not allowed to obsess over it-- I can just learn from it. |
I hope to continue to learn and improve each week so stay tuned for future updates!
Didn't catch the first 5 weeks of Tableau Tutorial Tuesday? You can see them here or watch them below.
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Week 5: How-to teach your stakeholders to leverage the pause button when interacting with dashboards on Tableau Server
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Week 4: How-to create an info button to provide additional information to your end users
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Week 3: How-to create a table with custom columns in Tableau using a filter on Measure Names
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Week 2: How-to use floating layout containers to build dashboard templates and standardize reporting in Tableau
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Week 1: How-to color positive and negative values of a continuous measure in Tableau using a 2-step diverging color palette centered at zero
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Why Tableau Tutorial Tuesday? My inspiration to challenge myself to do Tableau Tutorial Tuesdays was and continues to be the Tableau community. I have found it to be a community that is built around a common passion that thrives on knowledge sharing and support at all experience levels. Every user group, every conference, every presentation-- they all have those 'ah ha' moments where someone shows something (that may or may not be the focus of their presentation) that goes into my toolbox for future use. There are countless amazing blogs, twitter feeds, and other resources out there to learn Tableau, but often times it is that 10-second 'ah ha' moment on something that may seem small that transforms how I use the software. Tableau Tutorial Tuesday is my way of sharing some of the 'ah ha' moments I have learned back to the community.
