If you’re like me you’re watching plenty of videos online. I don’t mean funny cats clips or\u00a0fail compilations. What I’m talking about are lengthy videos about game development, politics, self improvement or the like.<\/p>\n
A while ago I was wondering how I could get faster in watching videos.\u00a0You may be familiar with\u00a0clicking through suggested videos on YouTube and hitting\u00a0the Watch Later<\/em> button (way too) often.\u00a0Pushing videos to the queue is easy but consuming them takes time.<\/p>\n I’ve already boosted my reading speed\u00a0as mentioned\u00a0in my book Game Project Completed<\/a>. Therefore I wanted to figure out how to do\u00a0the same for\u00a0videos.<\/p>\n So,\u00a0how can you reduce the time for watching all of your\u00a0videos?<\/p>\n YouTube allows you to increase\u00a0playback speed. Just click the gear icon in the right bottom corner of the video player area and change the Speed<\/em> setting. If your browser doesn’t use HTML5 for YouTube videos go to\u00a0www.youtube.com\/html5<\/a>\u00a0and activate it. Check out this video<\/a> for details.<\/p>\n I didn’t investigate other video portals like Vimeo regarding faster playback. Firstly because the majority of videos can be found on YouTube anyway. Secondly, speeding up playback is a minor\u00a0trick for watching\u00a0videos in shorter time. The following tricks are way more useful.<\/p>\n Read\u00a0the video’s description and decide upfront, if you really want to watch it. Not watching it is always the most effective shortcut.<\/p>\n Go through the video by watching just any Nth minute. For example: watch minute 5, watch minute 10, minute 15, and so on. If these samples look\u00a0interesting you may want to watch the whole thing. Skip it otherwise.<\/p>\n Many videos (I “watch”) can be consumed just by listening to them. These can be interviews, talk shows or presentations (many slides just resemble\u00a0notes anyway).<\/p>\n There are limits, though. It’s impossible for me, for instance, to listen to any speech while I’m writing a blog post or working on a book. The double-language input interferes in the language processing part of the brain. But it’s no problem to listen to interviews\u00a0while checking\u00a0my bank accounts.<\/p>\n Another trick is to rip the audio\u00a0of videos to MP3 files and listen to them while driving, doing housework or going for a run. There are plenty of online services like www.convertmemp3.com<\/a>\u00a0you can use for\u00a0this\u00a0for free.<\/p>\n Last but not least you may watch your queued videos in order of interest, not by appearance in the queue. In this case the most interesting videos get watched\u00a0first and the least interesting videos get (left) behind. The videos you delay\u00a0the most don’t seem to be that interesting, do they? Think about dropping\u00a0them.<\/p>\nSpeed up Videos<\/h2>\n
Prune by\u00a0Description<\/h2>\n
Skimming<\/h2>\n
Listen to Videos While Working<\/h2>\n
Long Tail Decay<\/h2>\n