From the Mist

This is going to be a small, technical tutorial on how to save a lot of time by watching videos at higher playback rates.

I first read about this idea from my most favorite personal development blog at Steve Pavlina.com. In his post “Overclock Your Audio Learning” he says that he occasionally listens to audios at 4.1x. At this speed 4 hour video/audio can be listened in less 1 hour!

How to Save Time by Watching Videos at Higher Playback Speeds

I have been advocating friends and colleagues to acquire the skill for some form of fast-reading or speed reading. It is a skill everyone can learn, and will bring with it many advantages. But this can not only be done for reading, but also for listening to audiobooks (which I do a lot) and watching video’s.

Note: after experimenting a little with this, I increasingly found there is a difference between reading and watching/listening. When speed-reading I typically make something akin to “page pictures” in my mind, taking in whole paragraphs at a time, or sometimes even whole pages. It may be compared to a gestalt. I have a strong impression of changing my mental state for this. For audio/video this does not really seem to work. I find that the mental state for speed watching/listening does not really change, it goes faster, and not that much faster at that because it is still in the sequential state, which is really slow in fact.