Benefits I've found listening at speed multiples

Some thoughts on listening at 2x speed. This isn’t necessarily about listening double speed but consuming at an increased rate whether it be a podcast, an audio book or even a YouTube video. Yes, people can sound a bit weird or darn illegible depending on who’s talking but as people naturally speak faster or slower its about finding the right rate for you.

The benefits I have found from listening at an accelerated pace, obviously I save time, I can consume more information and I genuinely feel like my brain and thinking have increased in speed. I feel like I’m taking in information a lot faster now, like not even just listening but other sensory information such as sight. I feel like when I see something I can process it faster after months and years of listening increase the speed.

The reason why I started two times speed is because I can’t read books. I can’t sit there and focus on reading a book, so I prefer audio versions but sometimes when you see a massive 20 hour book it seems like a daunting task. But if you listen at 2x speed and you’re able to, that would reduce it to 10 hours so it’s the same information just condensed down. Now that sounds like a much more manageable task to dedicate 10 hours to this book rather than 20 hours.

So I am consuming things that I would have otherwise passed on because of the mammoth task that they seem to be. A perfect example for me, of a book that I saved major time on is A Game of Thrones. The fifth book A Dance with Dragons is 48 hours and 53 minutes on Audible to listen to, that at 2x speed is 24 hours which is great, I’ve gained an entire day, but I think for this one specifically I’m able to listen at about 2.5x speed which reduces it further to about 19 hours total. I could literally listen to the book more than twice in the same amount of time that it would take normally which is brilliant.

Not only is it books but podcast as well. The podcast app I use is PocketCasts which has features that reduce the silences in between speakers talking because sometimes in podcasts people pause and this tries to intelligently reduce those gaps which saves you mere seconds but they add up and compound over time. And time is our most precious resource. If I go to my profile section I can see how many hours I’ve listened to and how many hours I’ve saved. I’ve listened to 20 hours and with skipping, listening at variable speeds, and trimming silences I’ve saved a total of 16 hours which is 75% of the listening time which is crazy. That’s time that otherwise would have being essentially thrown away because I’ve still got the same amount of enjoyment and knowledge as I’ve trained my brain to accept essentially a higher bandwidth of information.

The latest change in speed increases I’ve done is I started watching YouTube videos at increased speeds because largely I watch channels where it’s mainly talking and it’s less about the visuals so I can speed it up and as long as I can still understand them I’m still getting the same net benefit from the video. I mainly listen about 1.5x speed because some YouTubers sound a bit tinny depending where you’re watching the video. I’ve found it differs from my phone or even different web browsers. To increase the speed on YouTube I use a browser extension that picks up that there is a video on the page and I have a preset to 2x speed so I just press the keyboard shortcut and it would change to 2x speed rather than me having to change it on YouTube every time manually, it saves me a little bit of time that way as well.

I encourage you to give it a go, not just from a productivity point of view but as a means to increase your brains bandwidth too. I feel that the brain works a bit like a muscle in this regard, so you have to work up to those higher speeds rather than just going for it and then not understanding anything and quitting. You need to start at 1.25x speed then go to 1.5x speed and go to 1.75x speed and 2x speed and the goal here isn’t to get to as much speed as possible. The goal is to save as much time as possible because it’s all you have in the end.

Thus I implore you to give it a go. Best case you start to think quicker and worst, you save some time. Win-win?