Our Alternating Improvement Schedule (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

If you missed it, check out our 2023 plans here! https://www.patreon.com/posts/76702217?pr=true

This is something we've talked about indirectly before, but never directly. I wanted to write a quick behind-the-scenes on some stuff coming up.

One of the things we've been doing over the past year or so is rotating through 'slow weeks' and 'fast weeks' for publishing. Basically, weeks like now -- with all the CES news, the GPU review, and CPU reviews coming up or passing -- we're slammed with non-stop production. That means everything is focused on producing videos or reviews, and all 'general improvements' pause. But, to make sure we don't get stuck in a brutal cycle where we're only ever trying to keep up (and not improving processes, adding tests, evolving methodologies), we try to rotate production pauses through the schedule.

For the past year, I've been doing these once every 3-4 months. We typically slow down for 1 week, then I've been trying to slow production for 2 weeks a couple times a year. This normally means we reduce our publishing cadence on YouTube to just 1-3 videos in a week (from 3-5), but that allows us to use that week to work on things internally.

Once we're through the non-X CPU review cycle, since it looks like there'll be a temporary clearing of products, our current plan is to work on clearing out old projects:

Video Team

The video team will be working on attempting to add overhead rails to the studio for lights. We really want to get them off the tripods and onto the ceiling, which will allow better mobility and more permanent set lighting.

The team also wants to clear our Wendell server build. We actually filmed it back in... probably September or October, but we got so slammed with everything else that we couldn't cut through it. That'll be on their list.

Additionally, they'll be working with me on producing some of the tour content from Taiwan.

Testing & Writing Team

The crew on tests/writing will mostly be doing training. Patrick will be helping Jeremy learn about prebuilt reviews, which will help pull some of that work off of Patrick so that he can help me advance our internal software we use (we do some development for chart / data management, stuff like that).

Mike, our technician, will begin retesting all the CPUs with a 4090 for our future X3D reviews. We don't have those chips yet, but when we do, we definitely need to be off the 3090 Ti. It'll bottleneck us.

My Projects

I really want to get back to working on some of our new testing equipment. I keep getting bound-up by the reviews rat race, but without any major ones in sight for a while, I just want to improve our testing procedures and learn new tools. 

It's tough to escape the review cycle. People need those reviews to make purchasing decisions, but if you only ever benchmark, you risk stagnating -- or, for me -- you just get fatigued. I really want to work on some creative tasks, like producing the storytelling edits from Taiwan tours, developing test methods, and possibly trying to update our case test bench.

In other words, after the non-X reviews, we're going to slow public postings for 2 weeks (probably down to 1-3 per week) while (1) the team just recovers from this review cycle and (2) we work on some fun/new projects to set us up strong for the next few months.

It's all about constantly iterating and advancing, and we can't do that if we treat every review like it's the most important thing. I'm excited for the next couple weeks! These review cycles hit the team like a funnel: It lands hardest on the testing team first, then they get reprieve and it goes to the writing team, then to the editing team last. So we have rolling breaks, basically, but then we try to have one big break / slow down for everyone for at least a few days.

Looking forward to showing you the changes!