Half a Life In Twice the Time
The productivity hack that wasn’t
“My name is Sarah, and I have a YouTube problem.”
“Hi, Sarah!”
I try to be a productive member of society. I work, I raise kids, and I spend several days a week with my mother at her Memory Care facility. Still, I have a hidden problem: my YouTube addiction.
I have known for years that I waste too much time watching videos on YouTube. And I do not usually watch educational videos. Sure, I’ve watched some about how to get my toilet to stop running or how to lay carpet tiles, but mostly my YouTube viewing consists of free movies, movie trailers, comedians’ specials, and endless clips from my favorite British and other TV shows.
But then I discovered the best “productivity hack” ever. I now watch all my videos at 1.5x their regular speed. This means I can watch the latest episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight in 16 minutes rather than 24. So, great, right?
Wrong. Not so great.
I don’t have any scientific basis for or any links to psychological journal articles on the subject of being more productive by watching all my videos faster.
In fact, when I went looking for articles like that, all I could find were articles that heralded the fact that students who…
