Why Editing Takes So Long (And How to Fix It)
- Samantha Morgan
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
If video editing feels like the place where your content plans slow down or stop entirely, you’re not alone. During our recent webinar, Why Editing Takes So Long (And How to Fix It), we dug into a truth that resonates with a lot of small businesses, nonprofits, and creators: editing isn’t hard because you lack skill, it’s hard because it asks you to make too many decisions.
Filming often feels manageable. You show up, hit record, and get the footage. Editing is different. Once everything lands on your computer, you’re faced with a long list of choices, what to cut, what to keep, how it should look, how polished it needs to be, and whether it’s even worth finishing. That mental weight is what causes people to procrastinate or avoid editing altogether.
A big part of the webinar focused on the psychology behind this. When something feels complicated or open-ended, our brains naturally push it off. Add in perfection pressure, and suddenly a short video feels like a massive task. The result isn’t unfinished content because people don’t care, it’s unfinished content because editing feels heavy.
The solution isn’t learning more features or chasing more advanced tools. It’s reducing the number of decisions you have to make.
That’s where the live demonstration came in.
We spent most of the demo working inside Canva to show how pre-built animations, templates, and graphics can dramatically lower friction. By starting with a designed structure instead of a blank screen, many of the visual decisions are already made for you. Text animates without manual keyframing. Motion feels intentional without extra effort. Instead of asking “How do I build this?” the editor simply reacts and adjusts.
This tradeoff, less precision for more speed, is often exactly what people need to move forward. Canva isn’t about doing everything, it’s about helping you finish.
We also talked through why trying to force the same kind of animated graphics inside a more advanced editor can slow people down. While professional editing software excels at precise cuts, layering footage, and fine-tuning audio, it often requires significantly more decisions to achieve the same visual effects. That doesn’t make it worse, it just means it serves a different purpose.
The key takeaway from the webinar was simple: editing feels easier when the tool matches the task. Speed comes from choosing tools that remove friction, not from trying to master everything at once.
When you limit decisions, you reduce procrastination. When you reduce procrastination, videos get finished. And finished videos are far more valuable than perfect ones that never get shared.
This webinar served as a preview of our upcoming in-person workshop, Editing Faster, Smarter, Without Losing Your Mind, where we’ll take these ideas further and help participants build editing workflows that work for their real schedules, real tools, and real goals.
If editing has been the thing holding your content back, simplifying the process is often the fastest way forward.
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