Note From Tongal: “Producing is Organization: How to Stay Organized” is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog!
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We just got married. Thank you, but hold the applause. I say this to say in spending the better part of a year planning our dream wedding and honeymoon (of which we are currently on) we learned that we were only able to pull it off in the fashion we did because we are both natural-born producers. And the skill set involved in producing is the exact same skill set you need to be an expert wedding planner. Just ask our actual wedding planner who we ran circles around on a daily basis.
I hear your skepticism, but the two functions have more in common than you realize, than even we realized until we went through it.
The Vendors. On a film or TV project you are tasked with hiring a bunch of qualified craftsmen to apply their singular trade and work in harmony with the rest of the crew at the best possible rate for a certain contracted period of time. Organizing a wedding event -- same exact thing. You have a budget and you are asked to assemble a team and form an artificially close bond that you know will be severed within minutes, days, weeks of saying "I do." You are throwing all your trust in them to execute an agreed-upon vision. Are you starting to see the parallels? (That last sentence I can't even tell if I was referring to producing a project or planning a wedding.) Again that's how similar producing and wedding planning are.
We wouldn't have been able to pull it off if we didn't understand the keys to producing. The one fundamental trait in our producers’ toolbox that we found most relevant to wedding planning was staying organized.
Organization is a producer's best friend. And disorganization is like the school bully who robbed you of your lunch money, stretched your underpants over to your forehead, held you upside down while the toilet flushed with your business still in it and took your crush to the homecoming dance. Worse yet, it’s a school bully of your own making. So yeah, you're gonna want to learn how to get organized and fast.
In production, one of the things you are in charge of is the schedule. Make a bad schedule and your project could suffer in numerous ways. In wedding planning, they call this the timeline. In both scenarios you want to create a schedule that is realistic and achievable. Do this and your life (and everyone’s lives around you) will be easier.
To pull off a great schedule/timeline, you need to clearly communicate what you want and what is expected of every vendor. If organization is your best friend, then communication is that second best friend (who you sometimes tell is the best friend to keep them close and making sure they always have your back). If you don't communicate well then I don't want to tell you in graphic detail what the school bully is going to do to you next. Even my metaphors have limits.
Communicating to your vendors and crew requires clearly expressing the information they need so that they can go off and do the job you hired them for. Anything more or less than that and you are wasting everybody's time. For our communication, we made sure all relevant parties (in our case, the other person) were always on the call or CC'd on the email. That way we never had to waste time catching the other person up.
By producing together, on both our Tongal projects and our dream wedding/honeymoon, we can double check ourselves and always be each other's back up -- whether we’re trying to decode a vendor's email we didn't quite understand or reminding each other of project deadlines.
If being organized is the cheat code to to success then you need to stay organized. How do we do this?
Set overarching monthly goals. In production that might be to finalize the script, and for wedding planning that might be hiring a photographer. In either scenario, once you set a benchmark, you need to break down how you will get there in time. To do this you need to create smaller weekly goals and from there turn that into bite-size checklists. Let's take the ‘hiring a photographer’ as an example and demonstrate our entire process:
That's wedding planning. That's producing. That's (dare I say it) life. Using organization and communication to pave the way; taking a big item and breaking it down to accomplish whatever the task at hand is.
