My 2024 UK Trip and YouTube

February 27, 2025
2013 conference at FB
At the 2013 conference in Menlo Park, CA, a few years before it became my job.

Every year, as part of my job, I get to organize and attend a small tech conference. Our primary sponsor these days is a global financial firm with offices in Europe and Asia. Because their tech offices are located in London, that’s where they’ve hosted us since they first stepped up to sponsor us in 2019.

The conference lasts four days. I used to give myself only an extra two or three days for sightseeing, but when my wife started going with me in 2018 (we were in Munich that year), I started planning a two-week trip. I bumped it up to 19 days in 2022, and last year it was 21.

The 2024 edition was the first trip I planned since starting my YouTube channel. I anticipated that my post-conference workload was going to present a challenge. As my departure date got nearer, I realized that being out of Korea for three weeks also posed a problem. That was the one I needed to solve first.

Problem #1

Three weeks in the UK are three weeks in which I’m not creating new videos about Korea. My current goal, given my normal workload, is to publish at least three public videos each month. If circumstances are such that I can only publish two, so be it, but that should be a rare thing. I never want a trip to be the cause of it.

The solution was to record and edit three videos in quick succession before I left. I could publish one immediately and upload the other two for later publication while I was away.

I was scheduled to fly out on Tuesday, September 10th. I wanted to get all three videos completed before the weekend of the 7th, but that didn’t happen. I had a lot going on that week.

I shot the first video, a hike across Yebong and Ungil Mountains, on September 1st. That was no problem. I’d had it in my head for a while and didn’t have to do much prep for it. It just required that I set aside a full day to record. It took about three days to edit, but that’s not unusual (though as my channel members already know, I ended up accidentally deleting all of my footage from that shoot after I published it). This was like making time for any given video I’d published before.

I wasn’t able to get around to the next video until Saturday the 7th. That was the one in which I visited Yongsan Park. Under normal circumstances, I’m happy when I’m able to film a new video less than seven days after the previous one. This time was different. This was very much not like making time for any given video I’d published before. I had a very limited window in which to edit this one and also shoot and edit the third one.

I had two appointments on Monday the 9th, the day before my flight. When I’d made them, I hadn’t envisioned that I’d be so tight on time for editing. Even so, the thought of canceling them never entered my mind. I had to work around them.

I can’t recall what I had originally planned for that third video, but it wasn’t what I ended up recording. I changed things up in order to have more time to finish editing the second one. I needed something that required no more than the bare minimum of preparation: no searching through the Korean internet, no digging through books or other resources. It had to be something that allowed me to just pick up my camera and start talking. It also had to be something that I could shoot as quickly as possible. Every hour I spent recording was an hour less I had for editing.

The result was Reflections on my 33 Years in Korea. This is one I’d had in the back of my mind as a vague idea for a short while, but that I hadn’t put much thought into. On Saturday night, I spent a few minutes brainstorming some bullet points I might cover. On Sunday, I jumped right into it. I managed to get the recording completed within a couple of hours.

I considered carrying my files with me to edit them on my laptop while I was in the UK. I have an M1 MacBook Air that I bought in January 2021. I primarily use it for writing and editing text when I want to get away from my desk. I find I’m more productive writing in public spaces. There’s something about the background noise in a coffee shop that helps me get into the zone. A MacBook Air is great for that.

What it isn’t great for is editing 4K 60 fps videos. It doesn’t have the horsepower of a MacBook Pro. It doesn’t help that I’m using the base model with only 8GB of RAM. The video editing software I use has a very different performance profile there than it does on my desktop computer. It’s usable, but only barely. I can’t even begin to predict how much time it would add to the process. I could see myself spending hours in my hotel room over a few days just to edit two videos.

Then there’s the small screen. I’m so used to editing videos on two monitors (three as of very recently, which is even better) that the MacBook Air’s screen feels frustratingly limiting. Another thing that would slow me down.

The only practical option was to get both videos edited and uploaded by Monday night. I had a 4:20 am bus to catch on Tuesday. There was no time to fool around.

Today, I have no memory of editing those videos. I remember shooting them, but the rest of the process is a total blank. All I know is that I got them both uploaded on Monday and still had time to pack.

Problem #2

Before I left, I knew I’d have a huge pile of work to get through once I returned. I had a backlog already, more would pile up while I was away, and the conference would bring another stack to throw onto the pile. I’d be able to spread some of it out over months, but there was a significant amount I’d have to get done within weeks. Finding time to make new videos was going to be challenging in the first couple of months back.

It was an obvious and easy decision to take my camera with me and shoot a whole bunch of footage for some travel vlogs. This would have some big benefits.

  1. It would eliminate the time required to plan and record new videos when I returned. New videos typically require 3 or 4 hours to shoot, and planning can vary from a few minutes to a few hours depending on the topic.

  2. I could spread the editing out over several days. Normally, once I start work on a video, I’m aiming to get it out as quickly as I can. I work in chunks of time for each phase: planning, shooting, and editing. Often, I devote an entire day to shooting and the initial editing pass. Sometimes I can finish it all in one day, but usually it takes two or three. With all the footage already shot, I could edit for an hour here, two hours there, or whenever I had time over the course of a week.

I expected I could publish anywhere between 3 - 6 videos to cover the entire trip, I’d get them all out in October and November, and I’d be back to my Korea content in December. Reality had a different idea. I’ll come back to that.

I know enough about running YouTube channels to understand that these UK videos would have a negative impact on the number of watch hours I see in my analytics. Some percentage of my regular viewers would be interested in them, but I anticipated it would be a small one. The majority of my regular viewers keep coming back because they’re interested in videos about Korea. That’s the kind of channel I’ve built and that’s what they’ve come to expect. Most of them weren’t going to care about the UK stuff.

Fewer watch hours means lower ad revenue. There’s no way around it. Even so, the alternative was to put out no videos at all, maybe one or two if I were lucky, for a couple of months. That was even less appealing. Making those UK videos was a nobrainer.

Here’s how that went.

My expectations about watch hours were met. My videos Seoul Vlog: A Rare Heavy Snow Day and Seoul Vlog: Lasers and Coffee are the two least watched Korea-related videos on my channel. Five of the nine UK videos are below those, and three are immediately above them. Only the first UK video climbed a bit up the list.

Of course, I saw that happening as I was pushing the UK videos out there. I didn’t care. This series was very much a “me” project. I wanted to see it through to the end even after I had more time to make some new Korea content. That’s because I learned two surprising things.

The first was that I really enjoyed putting those UK videos together. It allowed me to relive the trip while it was still fresh in my mind. I was kind of having fun all over again, but from a different perspective. I was digging out a narrative from each day of the trip and packaging it up in a story I could relive again and again. Not just me, but also my friends and relatives back in the States.

That was the second surprise. I always post pictures and short video clips of my trips on Facebook. After I published the first UK video, I heard from my neice the she, my sister, and my mother all had enjoyed watching it and were looking forward to seeing more. This was the first time they’d been able to experience one of my trips beyond the frozen snapshots and contextless clips on Facebook. That alone was motivation enough to keep going, and it informed my editing decisions from the second video on to the last.

Future travel vlogs?

The 2025 conference is scheduled for mid-August. We’re back in London. Unfortunately, I have a potential scheduling conflict that may prevent me from attending. If that happens, one of my colleagues will have to make sure everything runs smoothly on site, but I’ll still be running the live stream from home and handling issues remotely via real-time chat. So no big deal. The upside is that there’ll be no major break in my Korea content in that case.

Resolving the conflict might mean taking a shorter trip. But if I’m able to stretch it out for two or three weeks, I won’t hesitate to put together another video series to document it. I enjoyed making them and sharing them with my family so much this time around, it’s another nobrainer.

If you’d like to leave a comment about this blog, you can do so via the YouTube Community post where I announced it.