It is called Getting Things Done, by David Allen. The subtitle is The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. It came out in 2001.

And before buying it I had a decision to make, one I did not expect to spend any time on.

There are two editions. The original from 2001, and a revised one from 2015.

I went for the original first. My logic was simple, and I suspect you would have followed it too.

The first one is the real thing. The pure version. The one closest to what the author actually meant, before anybody talked him into changing anything.

Then I stopped and looked into why he revised it at all.

I read what people who had used both editions were saying. I watched David Allen explain why he believed a new version was necessary.

And I ended up doing something I almost never do with a book. I compared the two editions before deciding which one to buy.

The difference was obvious once I looked. He rewrote it to reflect how much information technology had changed in between. In 2001 the inbox was one more tray on your desk. By 2015 it had become the desk.

The world he was describing had moved. So he moved with it.

But here is the part that stayed with me, and the reason you are reading about a productivity book in a broadcasting newsletter.

He did not rewrite the principles. The basics of the system are the same in both editions. What he updated was how those principles meet a world that no longer looks the same.

I bought the 2015 one.

And then, somewhere between paying for it and the first chapter, the question turned around and pointed at me.

When was the last time you updated the way you work?

Not your values. Not your work ethic. The actual mechanics.

The way you run your day, prepare a show, take your notes, hand off information, learn something new.

When did you last look at any of that on purpose?

I asked myself and the honest answer was uncomfortable.

Many of the habits I still use, I built when I was editing on three quarter inch tape.

Then everything moved to Betacam. Then DVCPro. Then digital editing, and the tape disappeared from the room completely.

I started in a world where satellite was basically the only way to move a signal. Then fiber became more available. Then IP took over, and soon the conversation will change again.

So yes, I have updated. Many times.

But I updated because the world left me no choice. The tape machine was gone, so I learned the new system. The satellite booking became a fiber order, so I adapted.

I never sat down and decided to update. I was pushed, and I called it evolving.

That is what the book did to me, before it taught me a single thing about productivity.

It just made me notice that a 25 year old book had been more deliberate about staying current than I have been about my own way of working.

The book got a second edition on purpose. Mine kept getting rewritten by circumstances.

Being updated is not the same as updating yourself

There is a real difference between the two.

When the change is forced on you, you learn the minimum you need to survive it. You keep your old logic and you paint the new tool on top of it.

When you choose the change, you get to ask better questions. What is actually still working here? What am I doing only because I have always done it this way?

One of those keeps you current. The other one keeps you a step ahead.

And let me be clear about what does not get updated.

Your values do not change. Your work ethic does not change. How you treat the people around you, the way you back up your team, your standard for kindness, all of that stays exactly where it is.

Everything else is fair game. If it does not go against your values, it can be changed.

Why this moment

The excuse to wait has disappeared.

Automation is already inside newsrooms. It is showing up in sports production. The AI conversation is not coming, it is here, and most of us are somewhere between curious and quietly nervous about it.

I believe our industry will change more in the next five years than it did in the last thirty. That is my read, not something I can prove to you.

Which makes this the best possible moment to do it on purpose.

Not because someone told you your role is disappearing. Because you decided to look at your own way of working before anyone forced you to.

That is the whole difference between updating and being replaced by the update.

How to actually do it

Some people work better one step at a time. One habit, one tool, one process a month. If that is you, do that.

Some people need the big dramatic change for it to feel real. If that is you, go for it.

The method matters less than the honesty that comes before it.

Acknowledge that a change is needed. Acknowledge that you have been doing the same thing the same way for years, and that some of it is only habit now.

Then start.

And this is the important part. Start with action, not with planning.

Do not build a system to decide how to change. Do not read five more articles about it. Do not wait for the quiet week that is never coming.

Learn one new thing. Change one process. Break one habit that you know is only a leftover from a machine that does not exist in your building anymore.

Change starts moving the moment you do something different, not the moment you finally understand it perfectly.

Software does not update itself. Somebody decides it is time, sits down, and does the work. That is still true today, in the middle of all this AI.

The book did not earn a second edition either. Its author chose to write one.

Nothing updates itself. Not the tools, not the book, not you.

Keep the principles. Update everything else.

P.S. If you want this as one question, here it is. Pick one thing you did at work this week and ask yourself why you do it that way. If the only answer is “because that is how we have always done it,” you might have found your first update. I already found mine.

You have probably heard it plenty of times, especially from veterans who remind you that this is a thankless career, one where w…

Read more

They always knew it would be like this. Their contracts were event-related.

Still, that doesn’t make it any easier.

Uncertainty, professionally and personally, is not good company.

But besides being a very scary moment, you can also see it as an opportunity for your career.

In the end, what can you lose?

So take the opportunity. Ask yourself:

1. How long can you go while you find the next job?

2. What options do you have?

3. Who can help you?

4. Do you have to stay in the same lane, the same industry or area as your last contract?

5. What other events could be out there for you?

I know it is easy for me to say this because I am not in your position. That is true.

But I admire every single one of you who commits to a short-term project, gives your best, and, at the same time, has to plan your life after the contract ends.

That takes guts.

My experience with freelancers like you is a positive one, and I believe you can pull it off one more time.

And if this is your first time as a temporary contractor, I still believe you can do it.

Because you just did.

P.S. If you are looking for good people for your next project, I have a good list of contacts who I will gladly recommend. Just let me know.

For some others, life requires a pause in between projects.

I am with the second group.

After a big effort, my body and my mind need me to stop.

For many years,…

Read more

Some of these I learned. Some I already knew and the last 74 days just car…

Read more

They were minutes old. They were desperate to see their mom and to be fed. My wife was still in the surgery room, recov…

Read more

There will be positions you don’t get because you don’t know the right person.

There will be shows you don’t get booked for b…

Read more

“That is not part of my job.”

Sometimes it comes out exactly like that. Sometimes it is quieter. A request land…

Read more

What’s the recipe? What has been the key for you?

For many years I thought this was a very compl…

Read more

Three years later, every word still holds. With one update I want to be honest about.

A couple of weeks ago a college student from Texas asked me a…

Read more

EVS operator. Director. Camera op. Graphics. Audio. Lighting. Production manager. Whichever one you picked, the pat…

Read more

I have been reading it everywhere. Industry reports. Email threads. Forums. The comment section under every post about broadcasting, AV, concert production, live events.

When someone asks, “should I get into this business?”, the loudest voice in the room is a veteran telling them no.

The pay is bad. The schedule eats your life. AI is taking the jobs. The big companies are firing. The middle is disappearing. Run.

This week I read a thread on 4Wall’s blog, where the production community was asked one question: what advice would you give someone breaking into live events? They got 771 comments. 28 of them, give or take, were variations of one word.

Don’t.

And then, almost every single one of those same people, in the same comment or the one right after, admitted they could not imagine doing anything else.

One commenter opened with “RUN!!!!!” in capital letters. Then came a whole paragraph. A 35-year career. A production company built from nothing. Projects to be proud of. One regret: not enough time with family.

That is the shape of the whole genre. The veteran tells you to run. The veteran did not run. The veteran is not running.

1. I am not telling you to run.

I have read enough of these reports to know things are changing. Some roles are in extinction. Some markets are harder than others. Some companies that used to be a safe play are not the safe play anymore. The automation conversation I will dig into in next week’s edition is the wave coming for everyone whose job is one thing for a living.

All of that is real.

What is also real, and what almost nobody is saying loud enough: millions of people around the world still put food on the table because of this industry. Live sports. Live events. Daily news in dozens of languages. Streaming sports broadcasts. Branded content, YouTube channels. New platforms with new formats that did not exist two years ago.

The pie is not shrinking. It is being recut.

The veterans telling kids to run are not lying. They are looking at the role they had ten or twenty years ago and noticing it does not exist in the same form anymore. That is a real grief. But the role they would build now if they were starting fresh, that role might be the most interesting one in a long time.

Look at what is happening to late-night television. The pundits have been writing its obituary for years. In the USA, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert signed off this past Thursday after eleven years at the Ed Sullivan Theater. In one of his final episodes, Colbert reunited with his fellow late-night hosts and asked Jimmy Kimmel the question that sounds a lot like the one being asked of our industry: make a case for late-night. Why should it continue to exist?

Kimmel’s answer:

I look at the figures, and the fact of the matter is more people are watching late-night television now. We have a lot of shows. People watch it on YouTube now. People have a lot of different options, and yet they keep coming to us.

Jimmy Kimmel, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

That is the whole argument in four sentences. The format people are mourning is not the audience. The audience moved. The audience is bigger than it has ever been. The seats moved with them.

2. Who should actually run.

I want to be honest, because telling everyone to come in is also a lie.

If you came into this expecting a 9 to 5, you should run. You will be unhappy.

If you came in because you wanted fame or quick money, you should run. There are faster industries with better odds.

If your body cannot take the loads, the hours, the time zones, listen to your body. There is no medal for breaking yourself for a show.

If your relationships at home are not built for this lifestyle, no amount of professional success will offset what you lose. Build the relationships first.

But if none of that disqualifies you, and you still find yourself reading a newsletter like this one on a Saturday morning trying to figure out where you fit, you are probably one of us.

3. What I would tell a 22-year-old today.

Do not apprentice yourself to the role that is disappearing. Apprentice yourself to the craft that is durable.

The craft is: solving live problems under time pressure. Reading rooms. Reading rigs. Hearing when something is about to break before it breaks. Being the calm one when the feed drops.

The role can be live sports today and a live podcast network tomorrow and something we do not have a name for in 2030. The craft travels.

Pick a corner of this industry that is growing, not the corner you grew up admiring. Live sports is still there. Live events are back. Content creation has built a parallel production economy from almost nothing in ten years. New platforms with new formats need people who know how to build the unrepeatable moment.

The good corners are obvious if you look at where the money and the attention are moving. The hard part is letting go of the corner that already shaped your identity.

One line I keep coming back to

The veteran tells you to run. The veteran did not run even that her/his industry changed from tapes to files and from SD to HD. The veteran is not running.

The industry is changing. It is not dying. The veterans who are honest with themselves will tell you the truth in their second sentence, after the first one made the joke.

One question for you this week: What would you do if your kids come to you right now telling you that they want to work in the same industry you have been years?

See you next week.

Oscar S.

They line up on one nu…

Read more

The truck went dark and silent mid-show. The generator failed. The signal dropped. It took us three minutes to bring it back.

Three of the longest minutes of my life.

We got the game back. Then we sat down for the post-mortem.

The post-mortem found what post-mortems usually find. The backup power had never actually worked. There was no UPS in the truck. We had been one bad night away from this for a long time.

That is when I went looking. There had to be a better way to find these things than waiting for them to break us.

What I found

I came across a line attributed to the famous American investor Charlie Munger that he liked to repeat. “All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.”

He used it to teach inversion. Solve the problem backwards. Find what kills you. Then do not go there.

That hit. I kept reading. And that is how I found the pre-mortem.

The pre-mortem was popularized by psychologist Gary Klein in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article called Performing a Project Premortem. The technique is simple. Before the project starts, you assume it has already failed. Then you ask the team to write down every reason they think it failed.

You are not predicting the future. You are giving everybody on the team permission to say what they already secretly suspect, while there is still time to do something about it.

The post-mortem is what we have always done. The pre-mortem is what we should have been doing.

The two-word version

In a control room we don’t have time for a Klein workshop. But we can run the simpler version.

What if?

What if the generator dies. What if the talent does not show. What if comms drop on the side that runs the rundown. What if the iso operator on the goalkeeper cannot lock for the full ninety. What if the playback machine times out at the worst minute.

A club competition final, 2017. We asked “what if?” twice. First about the uplink truck. Then about the fiber feeding it. The uplink failed on air. The audience never saw it. A second fiber was already running on a separate path.

The discipline is the same as Klein’s. The format is two words. Asked early enough, in front of the right people, those two words have saved more shows than I can count.

Not because we kept bad things from happening. Because we already had answers in our heads when they did.

The pushback I got

The first time I ran a pre-mortem with a team I heard all of the lines.

“Don’t be so negative.”

“If we talk about it, it will happen.”

“No need to waste time on things that aren’t going to happen.”

I have a lot of sympathy for those lines. They come from people who care about the show. Nobody who is calm about the work asks “what if?” about a generator.

But over time I noticed something. The teams that were willing to sit with the question for ten minutes became the teams I trusted with the bigger shows. The ones who refused stayed where they were.

Planning for what we don’t want is how we get ready for what we don’t see coming. That is not negativity. That is the job.

The NBCU Academy line

I spent last week’s newsletter recommending the NBCU Academy video on the Super Bowl pre-game show. There is a moment in that video where the director says, “we have to try not to create curve balls for ourselves.”

He is right. The curve balls life throws at you are bad enough. The ones you create for yourself are inexcusable. That is what “what if?” is for. It promises you will not be the one who walked the show into a known hole.

It gives you the version of yourself that already thought about the worst case and already decided who would handle it.

That version is calmer at minute thirty when the thing actually happens.

The version of “what if?” for everyone else

If you do not run shows, the question still works.

What if the funding round closes a quarter late. What if the senior person on the project takes another job. What if the test that everybody assumes works actually does not. What if the demo on Monday breaks the way it broke last quarter and nobody fixed it.

You do not need a workshop. You need ten minutes, the right two or three people, and the question.

The post-mortem teaches you what already broke. The pre-mortem teaches you where you would die so you can not go there.

“Talking about what we don’t want is how we get ready for what we don’t see coming.”

Thirteen years since Costa Rica. The two words have not gotten old yet.

One ask

Forward this to a producer or a production manager who runs morning meetings.

If you teach live production, give your students ten minutes next week to imagine a show has already failed and write down every reason. Then watch them argue about who fixes what. The argument is the lesson.

Bulletin board

You read about the pre-mortem and thought, “I want to be in the rooms where this question gets asked before the biggest shows in the world.”

Here is your next move.

My course, The Global Business of Live Sports Production, is the field guide for the industry that runs those shows. Who is actually calling the shots on the biggest sporting events in the world. How their crew lists get built. How to get on those lists. Twenty-seven years of inside knowledge, organized so you can use it tomorrow morning, not someday.

65 broadcasting professionals have already gone through it.

TMB readers get 66% off. No code, no checkout gymnastics. The discount is built into the link below. If you have been on the fence, this is the week.

Take the course →

And NBC Academy just put the playbook on YouTube for free.

I have been in broadcasting for 27 years. This is the most useful twenty minutes I h…

Read more

Here is mine.

From now on, once a month, I am going to send you the same kind of messages I already text my friends during the week. “Did you see this?” “Listen to this one.” Things I would hate for you to miss.

Here we go.

1. The NAB floor is smaller. The show is not dying.

NAB Show 2026 closed with about 58,000 attendees. Up 5% from 2025, but still 44% below the 2017 peak of 103,000. This is my tenth NAB. The shrinkage is visible: no satellite trucks in the parking lot, entire exhibitor categories gone, booths replaced by software demos on laptops.

Three causes behind what is actually happening.

Engineers no longer need to fly to Vegas for information. Product announcements, demos, and deep dives stream on YouTube within hours, and most vendors now run online workshops for serious buyers. The exclusivity that filled the floor for two decades is gone. The information is everywhere. The room is no longer required.

The industry is aging, and the next generation does not think like us. Most broadcast engineers are between 50 and 70, retirements are outpacing replacements, and the cohort building for YouTube, TikTok, and streaming-first does not see a $5,000 trip to Vegas as necessary.

US media consolidation collapsed the domestic attendee base. Local TV groups that used to send teams of twenty now send three executives, if that. The decline is structural, not a pandemic hangover. NAB lost 12,000 attendees between 2017 and 2019, before COVID even started.

This is why IBC in Amsterdam is the show worth watching. In 2015, NAB was almost twice the size of IBC (103K attendees vs. 54K). Today the gap is down to 12,000 attendees. NAB did not get smaller because IBC got bigger, they both shrank. NAB shrank faster. Europe is running 5 to 7 years behind the US on the digital transition, and when it hits full speed around 2028, IBC will face the same pressure NAB is absorbing now. If you want the unvarnished version of this thesis, read Evan Shapiro.

The question for each of us is the one a friend asked me in a text last week.

Does NAB still work for you, or are you going out of habit?

If you cannot answer clearly, you are going out of habit.

2. The masterclass in listening hiding in ninety seconds.

Dallas Taylor, who runs Twenty Thousand Hertz and has made me listen to the world differently for five years, just put out a short video where Ben Majchrzak, senior A1 at NBC Sports, walks through where the microphones actually sit during an NBA broadcast.

The surprise is not how many mics he uses. It is where he puts them. Most of what you hear on the broadcast does not come from the microphone you would expect. Ben has been refining these placements for years, and what he describes in ninety seconds is the product of a thousand small decisions most viewers will never consciously register.

Watch it here. If you work in audio, you already know this. If you do not, this is the best ninety seconds of free mentorship you will get this month.

3. Netflix opens the live operations door.

The Netflix Tech Blog just published a long piece called The Human Infrastructure: How Netflix Built the Operations Layer Behind Live at Scale. It is worth your time if you care about where live operations is going.

Casper, Brett, and Alo walk through how Netflix acquires signal from remote venues, manages traffic, and serves millions of simultaneous streams. What surprised me is where they put their focus. The operational complexity is not in the streaming software, which is largely solved. It is in the people layer. Who is on call. Who owns what decision. How a runbook gets written so a new engineer can follow it at 3 AM when something fails.

Here is the part I keep thinking about. Traditional broadcasters spent decades building the opposite culture: tribal knowledge, specialists who are never replaceable, workflows that live in the head of the person who built them. Netflix is building the system where the company outlasts any individual. That is a cultural shift most of our industry has not even started. The tools will follow. The culture is the hard part.

One quote I cannot let go of this week

“Every company is a media company now.” Heard many times on the floor at NAB, Devoncroft, and SVG conferences.

Quick poll

Know a colleague asking if NAB is still was worth the trip, working on an audio team, or rebuilding live operations? Forward them this. One of the three will land.

See you next week.

Oscar S.

He had a new passion: Drones. He wanted to show me how his new toys could help in my shows. No guarantees, no contract, just a proof of co…

Read more

Every April, I trade comfort for concrete. Miles of it. The Las Vegas Convention Center kind, where you walk from hall to hall, meeting to meeting, until your sho…

Read more

I sit down in front of a screen, any screen, to watch a game, a race, a ceremony. And within seconds, I am no longer a fan.

I am working.

I look at the camera coverage. I notice the replay choices. I suffer when something goes wrong on screen. I voice my frustration with a director’s decision, even though I know that directing live television is one of the most complicated jobs in the world, and I might not be able to do it better myself.

If you are in this business, you know exactly what I am talking about.

You Are Not Alone

I have talked to hundreds of colleagues about this over the years. I have read comments on previous editions of this newsletter about it. The conclusion is always the same.

We all do it.

Your partner is next to you enjoying the match. Your kids are screaming at the screen. And you are sitting there, arms crossed, analyzing a camera cut that lasted half a second too long.

It is almost involuntary. Your brain has been trained to see what most people will never notice. That is not the problem.

The problem is what you do with it.

The Thin Line

There is a thin line that separates two very different habits. On one side, criticism. On the other, professional curiosity.

They look similar from the outside. Both involve noticing what happened on screen. Both involve having an opinion.

But they could not be more different in what they do to you.

Criticism Is an Empty Exercise

Let me be direct about this.

Criticism, by itself, is an empty exercise that damages the person who does it.

It does not help you grow. It does not teach you anything you did not already know. And it does not improve your standing in the industry.

What it does is something worse.

If you make a habit of criticizing other people’s work, your colleagues notice. They hear you tear apart a show during a dinner. They listen to you pick apart a director’s choices in a production meeting. And they start thinking one thing:

If this person criticizes everyone when they are not around, they will do the same with me.

That is how you damage relationships without even realizing it. That is how you build a reputation you never intended to have.

I wrote about protecting your reputation in TMB #143, "Don’t Burn Your Bridges." This is the quieter version of the same problem. You are not burning a bridge with a dramatic exit. You are eroding it, one comment at a time.

Become a Student of the Show

Now here is the other side of that line.

Instead of criticizing, you study. Instead of judging, you learn.

When you watch a broadcast as a student, three things happen:

You learn from what others are doing. Every show is a masterclass if you pay attention. That creative camera angle you noticed? That transition that surprised you? Someone made that decision under pressure, in real time. Understanding why they did it is worth more than pointing out that it did not work.

You share your learnings and grow with your colleagues. When you bring observations to your team, not complaints, but observations, you start conversations that make everyone better. "Did you see how they handled the VAR review on Saturday? That replay sequence was tight." That is a conversation that builds people up instead of tearing them down.

You understand how fans experience the broadcast. This one is easy to forget. We are so deep inside the machine that we lose sight of the person at home on the couch. Watching as a student helps you reconnect with the audience perspective, which is the entire point of what we do.

The Hardest Part

I will be honest with you. There is something even harder than going from critic to student.

It is learning to be a fan again.

That is what I am trying to do right now. To sit down in front of a race or a match and just enjoy it. No analysis. No frustration with the director. No mental notes about the graphics package.

Just the game.

It is incredibly difficult after 20 years in this business. Your brain fights you every second. But the people next to you, your family, your friends, they deserve to share that experience with you. Not with the version of you that is mentally in the production truck.

And here is something I did not expect. When I manage to turn off the professional lens, even for a few minutes, I come back to work the next day with more energy. More creativity. More love for what we do.

The best professionals in broadcasting are not the ones who criticize every show. They are the ones who never stop learning from them.

That is the line. Critic or student. One makes you bitter. The other makes you better.

Choose wisely.

If you know someone in this business who cannot stop working when they watch a game, send them this edition. They will recognize themselves in every paragraph.

Oscar