Over the last year I have started listening to podcasts on a more regular basis. Most of the time I have about 20 to 30 minutes while I am doing a chore or some other task. For a long time I was listening to Cory Doctorow’s reading of The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling, but felt like it was taking me too long to get through the episodes 20 minutes at a time.
I decided to start speeding up the podcast so I could get through more. First I sped up 1.10x to see what it was like but very quickly moved to 1.25x. I got so accustomed to listening at 1.25x that when I put an episode on a different device I thought Cory was talking really slow.
As I grew use to the speed I started listening to all my podcasts at 1.25x. After a while I increased to 1.30x, then 1.40x. Now I can listen to almost all at 1.50x speed. This has really changed my podcast listening and I don’t feel like I am falling behind so much.
On occasion the speed has to be dropped down again if somebody is talking quite fast at normal speed but I am surprised at how quickly I have become use to it.
I have started trying this for videos as well. Some vlogs I subscribe to can be sped up to about 1.35x at the moment. I think visual at speed is harder than audio. I have even managed to watch a few movies at 1.25x.
Now I need to work on improving my speed reading…