I’m thinking maybe I should have used Time Crunching 101 as the title instead… or maybe ‘Duh Duffy, where have you been? Everyone knows that!”

Ok, so maybe you won’t actually learn how to travel through time from this post but you will learn how to cram more learning into one day. We all know you can’t make it to every conference, every presentation, or every training session. The good news is that many of those events make their content available to either watch online or to download for off-line viewing. The problem is who has time to sit and watch all those presentations in real time? Not me. One trick I use is to view the content at an increased play rate. Why listen to a boring speaker like me drone on for the entire length of the session when you can listen to them drone on in almost half the time. :-)

I view nearly all off-line content with Windows Media Player though I’m sure you can implement this idea with any media playback software. The idea is changing the playback speed you view the content at. With Windows Media Player you can change the play speed from the menu system.

Once you have the Play Speed Setting panel open you can specify the playback speed. Depending on the content and the presenter I can typically listen between 1.6 and 2.0 times normal speed.

My Florida edumacation taught me that playing the video back at twice the speed means I’ll listen to it twice as fast and that means I can view it in almost 1/2 the time.  Too bad it won’t make me twice as smart. :-)

I hope this helps you speed your way through more training content.

Have a day. :-|