If you have trouble maintaining an editing habit, it’s likely not because you’re lazy. It’s more likely because your routine requires too much. You fire up the application with the best of intentions, you look at all the clips you’ve shot, you trim a few frames here and there, but you don’t really achieve anything concrete. You repeat the same thing the next time, and the next, and you never form a habit. A habit needs to be smaller than that. It needs to be low-effort to initiate, it needs to be low-effort to repeat, and it needs to have a narrow scope, so that each time you practice, you have a clear improvement to show for it, rather than just that you tried.
The first thing you can do is to pick a repetitive form, and practice just that one form. This could be a 10-20 second sequence, crafted from mundane footage. It could be a short montage of a single action. It could be a simple before-and-after edit of the same scene. Having a repetitive form reduces the cognitive overhead. You’re not solving a new problem every time. You’re just coming back to the same problem, and focusing on some different aspect of it, like tightening up your edit, or arranging your shots, or playing with the timing. And this is important, because the act of editing the same form repeatedly means you can focus on the aspects of editing that are relevant to you. You can compare like with like.
One way a lot of people go wrong is that they use practice time to start entirely new projects. And this feels like a great way to spend your time at first, but after a while, you’ll end up with a dozen half-finished projects, and no real way to know what you’ve improved at. A better approach is to edit the same short form multiple times. One day, focus just on edit points. The next day, focus just on shot order. The next day, turn the sound off, and see if the edit still makes sense. Editing the same thing over and over again isn’t a bad thing. It’s allowing you to see how different edits affect timing, and flow, and emphasis. And it’s much easier to see that when you’re not starting from scratch every time.
If you find you’re struggling to maintain a habit, don’t kill it, reduce it. If you can’t manage to edit for 30 minutes a day, edit for 15 minutes a day. If you can’t be bothered to shoot some new footage, edit something you already shot. If your project is too complicated, duplicate a single sequence, and play with that. In video editing, consistency is more important than intensity, because your eye is trained by regular exposure to edits, not by occasional massive efforts. You don’t need to have a huge session to improve. You just need a long enough session to make a single edit, and then review it, and figure out why it worked or why it didn’t.
A productive session can be done during a cigarette break, if you focus. Take the first 2-3 minutes to review your footage, and decide on a single editing goal. You might want to tighten up your transitions, or improve the head frames of your clips. Take the bulk of the session to create or edit a single short form sequence. Take the last few minutes to watch it repeatedly, and take notes on where your attention wanders, or where the edit seems to tighten up nicely. Save it, even if it’s still rubbish. Having a concrete record of your efforts will help you see things you won’t necessarily notice just from memory.
And over time, a daily editing habit will change the way you see your footage. You’ll start to see potential lead-ins, and better edit points, and moments where you need to allow things to breathe. And that won’t come from sitting around and waiting to be inspired. That will come from regular practice, from repeated experiments, and from critical reviews. And if you make your practice low-effort enough that you can do it daily, then editing will stop feeling like a guessing game, and will start feeling like a skill you can control.