Doubletime learning in the digital age

In my earlier years, I had an accomplished relative of mine told me, his greatest wish was to read all the books he collected on his shelf. It was a huge collection of biographies, self-improvement and thought leadership books.

His rationale and love for such content was simple and yet enlightening.

The author of the book spent his life going through and gathering the lessons learnt shaping his experience, and he documents all his learnings and opinions compressed into writing, and therefore reading his book is like going through the authors life without having to go through it. How sweet and simple, getting the essence of years of experience of a learnt individual through reading.

But I thought to myself, that is going to take a real long time, considering the large collection sitting there on his huge brown classic book shelf.

Of course, times have evolved and while there’s still a lingering love for the feel and touch of a real book, such content and more can be found on long form social sharing sites such as medium, youtube and many others. Authors have turned to video production to keep up with times, educational lectures and talks are streamed and recorded to increase its reach and accessibility to a large group of audience. People consume content better when there’s visual alongside the content.

I find myself rampaging through youtube for almost every other thing I wanted to learn about, there’s bound to be something I can learn from youtube from someone willing to vlog about it. And I cannot stop with the recommendations and suggestions from the platform, before I know it I probably spent a couple thousands of hours on youtube watching improvement videos over the years.

Now, one thing that has evolved alongside the digital evolution is the perspective of time; there is lesser time in a day, ironically. With that many things we can do, people wanted to accomplish more in a day, and we start to consume media while commuting. Patience grew thinner, or at least mine did, as compared to reading an entire book, a 45 min TED talk video pales in comparison in terms of time taken. But I still found myself hating the length of the video, my commute was only 30 min.

Until some years back when I found the speed increase option hiding on the bottom right corner of the videos. I was delighted! No more sitting through long slow paced speeches tailored for a live audience. It wasn’t easy at the beginning, it was like listening to speedy Gonzales + bugs bunny speak.

But this is a very useful current day life-skill to have! I started off with 1.2x and slowly 1.5x speed, and before long I was grazing through video content at 2x speed, that literally halved the time for learning what the content producer had to share. Similarly a student can just watch a lecture at 2x speed and halve the time spent on lectures.

A recent study report showed that students who watched a lecture at 2x speed digested information better and faster than students who did so at normal speed. It did not matter as long as the material could still be accurately perceived and comprehended, It’s ok to speed up playback.

There’s an adaptation curve to get used to it, but once you get it, you will start to wonder why you never did this before and you will be on your way to learning more things at half the time. If you haven’t tried learning to watched at 2x speed, start gaining this life skill today, be patient though.

You’re welcome