Streamlining "gold nuggets" from video content

Missing out on good content in video form?

You’re not alone - which is why I came up with a solution to help me stay on top of the high signal sources that I enjoy.

I don’t have hours and hours each day to literally watch each YouTube channel I find interesting, so what can I do?

Turns out there’s a solution or two :)

The Background

YouTube can be an incredible source of high quality content.

It can also be a black hole of junk and spirals that leave you wondering why you’re even online.

That said, I’m not going to throw the “baby out with the bath water” - I want to get the most out of YouTube and the channels that I follow.

There’s so much content though; how am I supposed to stay up to date and on top of the stuff I really enjoy and want to watch when there’s something like 100 billion hours of content uploaded every day?

The good news is that you can approach this like a lot of other content curation. Know up front that you can’t see it all, there’s no point to consuming it all, and your job is just to surface the important bits and to skip over the rest - treat it like a river.

Let’s take a look at how we can surface the important bits more quickly…

Recommended

2 Ways To Do This

If you’re regularly reading and curating information, you’ve probably got something like a read it later app (Feedly, Readwise Reader, etc).

Once you’ve got the content into your system it’s certainly easier to annotate, highlight, and make use of in other contexts.

However, video is still a little tough. For short videos you can import them directly into your system - a 2 or 3 minute video isn’t really any longer than a short article.

What about 30 minute videos? Or a 117 minute video?

That’s where it can get difficult and part of why I put Summarily to work on every YouTube channel I subscribe to and then connected it to Reader via the included RSS feed.

Using Summarily to get the video summaries into Reader means I have them located in one place, on autopilot, can quickly scan the summaries, and use the timestamp summaries to find out exactly which parts of the longer videos I want to focus on.

If you’re doing this on a one-off basis there’s several tools out there that you can use to get the gist or summary of, but for automating the process so that you don’t have to go out and spend time doing it for every single video…Summarily is probably the answer.

The second path might be to import the YouTube channel’s RSS feed into your tool of choice. That will get you the video in a single location - the downsides being that you’ll have to do this for each channel and it will just pull the video, not a summary.

Personally, I’ve found Summarily to be the best way to deal with staying up to date on high signal videos coming from multiple channels.

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