Why I Always Watch Videos on 2x Speed
You can think much faster than you can speak. This is a well-known phenomenon and is the reason why speed readers are often recommended to not verbalize what they’re reading, for example. It makes sense since speaking implies the need to formulate ideas, reflect on them, and contemplate how to express them in a way most conducive to the understanding of a particular audience. Even when we just regurgitate memorized information or read written text, the physical muscle movements required to deliver coherent speech are much slower than the neuronal action potentials required for thought.
Nowadays, however, much of the content that we consume is in audiovisual format. The natural generalization of speedreading to modern media formats is audiovisual speed augmentation. In the spirit of our fast-paced world, applications often have this feature built-in. If not, you can download free extensions, such as this one on Chrome, to speed up your media experience.
I originally realized the utility of video speed augmentation when replaying back lectures during university, to review information quickly prior to an exam. I realized that I’d get more out of a video if I watched it twice at 2x speed than once at 1x speed. Sometimes, I don’t even need to rewatch it and so I save precious review time. Often, I even used this newfound time to solidify the information I had just consumed by watching a different video on the same topic, getting a different perspective.
There are many other advantages to speed augmentation. For instance, I’ve found that watching the video faster challenges me, and in doing so forces me to stay engaged to understand. It requires that I focus to fully process everything. Furthermore, I suspect that our perenially diminishing attention spans may mean that consuming content on faster speeds keeps it within our attention span’s length, thus reducing the likelihood that we dose off within the span of the video.
Either way, once you get used to speed augmentation, you won’t look back. Eventually, all videos on regular speed begin to sound like they’re in slow-motion. As long as the speaker speaks clear and uses a semi-decent microphone, I’ve found that even speeds as high as 3.5x can be comprehensible. However, you may want to invest in high-quality headphones to maximize this rate.
In can be hard to get used to the increased speed, especially if you’ve never sped up videos before. To remedy this, I recommend slow incrementation. Begin watching at 1.25x, and work your way up by 0.25x at a time, up to a speed you’re generally comfortable with. Keep in mind that different videos may have a different optimal speed, depending on many factors such as why you’re watching them, the clarity of the speaker, the quality of their microphone, and the quality of your headphones.
You can test yourself on this YouTube video where I describe my decision to take a year off of academia to study data science, make my way through a book list, and hypothesize about the future of online education post-pandemic. Oh, and please feel free to connect with me on Medium or YouTube if you’re interested in any of that ;).
Finally, I’d like to note that speed augmentation is versatile in that it can allow you to simply understand the structure of a particular video, while being powerful enough to allow you to master its contents. In a content-rich Islamic lecture, Hamza Yusuf recounts his journey to mastering the art of reading. In it, he describes that any book worth reading is worth reading at least 3 times: the first time to understand its structure, the second time for information, and the third time to have a conversation with the author. I believe that this idea likewise applies to videos, and speed augmentation exists to make this practical in our busy lives. We can use the first watch-through of a video to understand its structure and to gather as much information from it as possible. Subsequent watch-throughs can be made to reflect on the information presented and internalize the information.
I hope that you’ve found this helpful. Please let me know what you think or how you will apply this technique to your workflow. Good luck!
