When You’re the One Holding It Together (But Not the One in Charge)

If you’ve ever worked as an Assistant Editor in unscripted post, you know the deal.

You’re expected to keep things running. Not just the media. Not just the cut exports. But the entire, invisible structure around the show. And the wildest part? You don’t get to decide how anything actually works.

The Setup You Inherit

You get dropped into a gig—two months, maybe three. You open your laptop and find:

• Google Drive folders that haven’t been touched since Season 2

• Airtable bases with columns no one uses anymore

• A Dropbox archive with five versions of every cut, none clearly labeled

• Maybe a spreadsheet titled “master_tracker_FINAL_FINAL2”

There’s no onboarding. Just a Slack ping: “Hey, can you export Ep 304 for network? The last AE had a system.”

Cool.

So you spend the first week just figuring out what “the system” is. Not because it’s written down, but because it’s still duct-taped together in scattered links and mental models left behind by whoever came before you. And here’s the real kicker: You’re expected to deliver flawlessly in a setup that barely holds.

The Illusion of Control

Being an AE means being the one responsible for keeping post on track, without any control over how it’s structured. You don’t choose the tools. You don’t set the workflows. You don’t decide who gets notified, what the naming convention is, or where the cuts are delivered. You just live in the leftovers.

Whatever worked well enough last season gets passed down. Whatever’s broken gets blamed on someone who isn’t here anymore. So what do we do?

We patch. We chase. We improvise. We juggle five different tools that all kind of do the same thing, hoping we don’t miss something crucial.

Slack. Spreadsheets. Dropbox. Drive. Frame. Post-its. Our own inbox as a to-do list.

We tell ourselves we’ve got a handle on it, but every AE knows the truth: We’re not running the system. We’re carrying it.

When No One Owns It, Everyone Pays

The Post Sups are slammed. The producers are chasing approvals. The EPs are asking why things are slipping. But no one’s looking at the system itself. Why would they? Everyone’s busy solving today’s fire. The problem is, without structure, every day becomes a fire. And as AEs, we’re stuck in the middle:

• We know the bottlenecks before they happen

• We know which naming conventions are falling apart

• We know who’s behind, who’s confused, and who’s checked out

But we’re not the ones empowered to change anything, and so we just deal with it. We build another workaround. We stay late to send the reminders no one else remembered. We make another manual checklist to catch what the spreadsheet missed. This isn’t just inefficient, it’s exhausting.

So We Built What We Wished We Had

Eventually, I hit the wall. I stopped trying to optimize someone else’s broken tracker. Stopped trying to fix Slack with more Slack. Stopped hoping that one more color code would make the chaos easier to follow. Instead, we built something that does what the system never did: Actually run on its own.

Here's a snapshot of what we made:

Network Cut Promotion

No more waiting on someone to walk a Vimeo link down the hall.

Now, a producer can promote a cut from internal to network in one click:

• The Vimeo export gets relabeled

• It’s uploaded to the right screening room

• Emails get sent to the team—automatically

• No confusion, no delay, no chasing

That 10-minute handoff that used to take two days? Gone.

Milestone Calendar That Actually Works

Not some spreadsheet. Not a half-synced Google Cal. A real-time, role-based calendar with:

• Visual monthly flags that let you focus on your priorities

• A milestone feed that tells you what’s due today, tomorrow, next week

• Personalization that makes sense—because you shouldn’t have to see 300 other people’s deadlines

You finally stop missing things because you didn’t know where to look.

Segment Review View

Airtable is great. Until it isn’t. When you’re staring at 1,200 records and 25 columns, you’re not prioritizing—you’re surviving.

So we built Segment Review:

• One record per card

• Latest cut, script, notes, VO—all right there

• No hunting, no extra tabs, no double-checking if that’s the right version

• Just click, watch, respond, move on

It’s exactly what you need, and nothing you don’t.

When It Finally Felt Like Post Was Running (Not Me)

I didn’t realize how heavy the job had become until I saw what it felt like to not carry it all.

Suddenly:

• I wasn’t the middleman for every export.

• I wasn’t the guy everyone needed to ping for filenames.

• I wasn’t babysitting the calendar.

I was just doing the work. And that? That was the whole point.

If You’re Still Holding It All Together

Here’s the truth: Most AEs aren’t overwhelmed because they’re disorganized. They’re overwhelmed because they’re the only ones paying attention. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

If your “system” still relies on someone remembering everything…

If you’re one missed update away from falling behind…

If you feel like the only person who knows how it actually works…

You’re not alone. But you don’t have to keep holding it all. There’s a better way—and it actually runs.