8 ms·

I speed listen to podcasts (and audiobooks and speed watch lectures) for an entirely different reason: I am able to maintain attention on the material. I am sur

• trisimix 9y ago
  Holy crap this might actually help me.
  • anotheryou 9y ago
    enjoy :) it really feels good to pump interesting thoughts in at the speed limit of perception and recognition :)
• rconti 9y ago
  I was studying for a cert and needed to review some material faster so I started doing 1.5x and 1.7x up to 2x. What's amazing is how quickly you adapt. The pauses in speech seem to take FOREVER, even at 2x, and when you slow down to 1.5x it seems positively glacial. But you're right, you need to focus. It leaves a lot less time for letting your mind wander. You don't get anything for free. I sometimes watch NFL condensed games and they cut out all the non-play activity so you can watch a game in 40 mins-- which sounds great, but you realize it's 40 mins of intense focus if you want to follow what's going on.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • fedups 9y ago
    > The pauses in speech seem to take FOREVER No kidding. Overcast has a "Smartspeed" feature that cuts out these pauses. The counter on my app says it's saved me 195 hours to date.
    • matrixagent 9y ago
      Could you tell me where to find that counter? I've looked everywhere… I for the life of mine can find it. I even tweeted the author. Google, looked at lots of reviews to find a clue… eventually I gave up and figured the counter must have been removed in an update before I got the app.
      • init-as 9y ago
        Same here I can’t find the counter in my app although everyone else seems to have it.
      • tnorthcutt 9y ago
        Settings (top left icon from main screen) --> scroll allll the way down. "Smart Speed has saved you an extre __ hours beyond speed adjustments alone."
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • infogulch 9y ago
        PocketCasts on Android does the same kind of silence removal. You can find it there in Settings > Stats. I recently wiped my phone but I'm pretty sure it was in the hundreds of hours saved before then.
      • mitchellhislop 9y ago
        It's at the bottom of the settings menu - click the little Overcast logo in the top left and scroll down. (Just went through this exercise to find it last week)
        • 3pt14159 9y ago
          It should be noted that it's in very small / grey font at the very bottom. Also, holy shit, this has saved me 255 hours, not counting speedups. That's crazy.
    • suprfnk 9y ago
  • evgen 9y ago
    I am convinced that a lot of podcasters take their cues from radio and other forms of broadcast journalism that lack the ability to let the user jump back 15 seconds if they missed something. I have never had a conversation with anyone where they talked as slow as people do on podcasts. Maybe it is some sort of post-production process to slow things down and make it possible for people who are not really paying attention to follow along, but if it were not for the ability to speed things up I would have abandoned most podcasts a long time ago.
    • SilasX 9y ago
      Similarly, I've noticed that if I listen at a comfortable pace (1.25x-1.5x) for a while, and then switch back to normal speed, it feels like the speaker is deliberately speaking slowly and hyper-enunciating, like they're talking to a small child or person with learning problems.
  • mgkimsal 9y ago
    " so I started doing 1.5x and 1.7x up to 2x. What's amazing is how quickly you adapt..." Listen to folks using screen readers reading off menus and navigation and such. Those users adapt to stuff going much much faster than 2x!
    • qznc 9y ago
      I onced listened in and got nothing. Found a claims of 300 words per minute [0] and 450 wpm [1], where normal speech is 150 wpm. So, 3x should be achievable with some training. [0] https://webaim.org/techniques/screenreader/ https://webaim.org/techniques/screenreader/ [1] https://www.vincit.fi/en/blog/software-development-450-words-per-minute/ https://www.vincit.fi/en/blog/software-development-450-words...
      • kthejoker2 9y ago
        I used to use one of those speed reader apps. I found that if I set it at ridiculous speed - 10,000 wpm! - you can still read the words but not really "read" anything i.e. be able to say anything intelligent about what you just "read." But then I would shift back to 4,000 wpm and suddenly it seemed so easy to keep pace. And the longer you stayed at 10,000 wpm the easier 4,000 became. I feel our brains are totally up the challenge.
      • burke 9y ago
        I've listened to a number of fiction audiobooks at 3x. I find it takes a couple of minutes to adapt to a new narrator/speaker at 3x, but it's not really a big thing. I'm not sure I'd retain much from a technical conversation at 3x -- for me the drop seems to be somewhere between 2x and 3x.
        • emodendroket 9y ago
          I read a lot and my pace naturally slows down or speeds up depending on the density and difficulty of the material; I'm sure a similar effect must apply to the speeds you need to follow a lecture or podcast at to actually understand it. I can't read a book-length classical epic poem or a dense technical book at the same kind of speed I can comfortably read a Sherlock Holmes book (well, I can, but I won't retain anything).
  • mandelbrotwurst 9y ago
    Do you mean 60 minutes or are you watching the games at 1.5x?
    • rtkwe 9y ago
      In NFL games the clock continues to run during non-play time like the offensive line resetting after a completed pass or a run or a sack so if your stripping out that time as well because nothing actually interesting is really happening you can get below the nominal 60 minute of actual play time.
      • rconti 9y ago
        Yeah, this. The condensed games actually include some time where the clock is stopped, too-- eg, the couple seconds leading up to a snap, or whatever. My least favorite part is sometimes they cut out what a penalty was called for and what the impact was.
      • mandelbrotwurst 9y ago
        Got it, thanks. Wow, that is an aggressive approach. IMO watching the players get back in formation, etc. is at least a little bit interesting in part because watching that process helps you predict what is going to happen after the snap.
  • trhway 9y ago
    >What's amazing is how quickly you adapt. At some point you'll start to hear what birds and other fast talking animals are saying. I'm not joking. I mean you'll still probably wouldn't understand them.
• plorkyeran 9y ago
  Same here. At 1x speed all but the most dense of lectures give my mind time to wander, and then I miss a few minutes of material. At 2x speed I find it much easier to stay focused, and can actually spend 30-60 minutes listening to a podcast without getting distracted. The fact that it also saves time is merely a bonus for me.
  • kurthr 9y ago
    Exactly, and that same focus and extra time means that you can stop/rewind/replay when you find something you don't know to root out the source of confusion at 1x or 0.5x. Most lectures at 1x border on unwatchable except for the very best presenters (and then you wonder how much you're learning as opposed to being WOWed.
• wink 9y ago
  +1 on this. I used to better at listening to "lecture" material at school, but in the last years it seemed to deteriorate. Even in university I noticed myself drifting away in thought, although the material was much more interesting to me than back at school. Same for any kind of webinar. When I did my first online course I switched to 1.5 and was pretty dumbfounded how nice it was to consume at what seemed like the proper speed. But it highly depends on the speaker. If someone speaks fast, 1x is fine - if someone is extremely slow, I'll use 2x. But I mostly listen to podcasts for entertainment reasons (i.e. people I wanna listen to about topics that interest me) so my desire to speed through is not so high.
• usrusr 9y ago
  Reminds me of the way movies can occasionally be a lot more engaging when I somehow missed the beginning: so much less predictable, and events feel more like they are happening because of hidden causality and less because of hidden (or barely obfuscated) plot requirements.
• dalbasal 9y ago
  Me too, though I'm worried indulging this tendency is building into bad habits, or traits or somesuch. For lectures, I tend to speedwatch with stops, replays and skips. In some cases, I am 100% convinced that like you, I'd have never been able to stay tuned. The whole thing has a tendency towards escalation, and the result comes with its own troubles.
• tw1010 9y ago
  Lectures isn't just about feeding the information into your brain. Half the battle of learning what the professor has to say is to process the material in your head, to let it bob around in your head a while. I often find that I can get a lot of that work done while still in my seat, as long as I allow those thoughts to bubble up. In other words, allow creative thoughts about the things the lecturer is saying to form – wander around in idea-space a bit – and think about them, while simultaneously keeping up with the thread of the speech. You'll gain a lot more from your time in the lecture hall, and it'll also be a lot more fun. A lecture shouldn't just be (and doesn't have to be) dry information stuffing.
  • anotheryou 9y ago
    I rather replay the interesting section (for complicated stuff even on normal speed) and speed-listen to what I know and what is easily understandable or booring. With video tutorials I have the same problem. On normal speed I will work ahead, take a wrong turn because I didn't know where the lecture would go or drift off in to something slightly creative and than notice that I missed a section where finally something new was explained. So I have to skip back and find where I started missing something (Something really really annoying with audio material; No thumbnails, no search, no skimming backwards, mostly no identification possible from a single frame or word (the easiest way to find a part again, to which I listened before, is to remember where on my journey I was when I listened to that part and where that was in relation to where I heard what is currently playing)).
  • westoncb 9y ago
    I like this idea, but I have found it to not work very well in practice. I would constantly get lost in lectures because the interesting new bits would kick off questions in my mind that needed to be resolved before it made sense for me to continue with more information. So I'd sit there exploring the new ideas—which was typically pretty beneficial—but then when I tuned back in I wouldn't know what they were talking about. When I get into that 'exploring mode' it tends to shut everything else out, so the 'simultaneously keeping up with the thread of the speech' isn't very doable, at least in my case. Books are an intrinsically better format for this since the amount of time required to 'process' the new information will vary a lot from person to person, and you get complete control with books. I can't see any benefit to the lecture format aside from mass consumption—aside from question-asking, which I do think is vital, but it is typically under-used. Books + lots of questions to an expert seems ideal.
• pouetpouet 9y ago
  I think the trick is trying to be ahead of the lecturer and guess where it is going, always a step ahead.
• komali2 9y ago
  If I don't speed it up, I get bored and start daydreaming. Whether I'm running, lifting, riding the train, cooking, whatever, if I don't amp the speed up I inevitably get bored.
• ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Same here, the only time I need to slow down is if I am REALLY unfamiliar with the subject matter. Reviewing data structures? 2x Ad retargeting in marketing course? 1.5x what wait 1x And then its back to 2x, I concentrate at listening better
• otakucode 9y ago
  When listening to a (non-fiction) audiobook or lecture about a novel topic, do you not find yourself needing time to think? When do you integrate the new information or ideas being presented into your existing framework of understanding?