Do you ever sit through your online lectures or videos for Uni, slumped in your chair, bored out of your mind – constantly checking how long is left before you can stop watching It? It’s important for you to watch your lectures as there’s a correlation between students who watch the lectures and students who get high grades.

However, when your lecturer is just going Ummmm and Uhhhh it makes it difficult to sit through the entire thing.

I’ve developed this idea of “Active Online Lectures” – where you control the pace of the recording to keep you actively involved in its teachings and make you more productive in school.

The idea is quite simply this: Using the recording’s controls, you set the speed of the video depending on how easily you understand what is being taught. This will help make you a more productive student.

For example,

When your teacher is talking slow, ‘umming’ and ‘uhhing’ and going on a side tangent, you speed up the recording to make it more engaging to you.

When your teacher is talking too fast, barely making sense because of the speed of his voice, talking so quick that it’s hard to follow and you lose concentration because of how fast he’s talking and you can’t keep up – slow the recording down to make it more engaging.

When your teacher opens a new slide with paragraphs of text – rather than trying to read the text while listening to him speak – pause the video to read and note it before they begin to talk about it.

You have complete control over the pace of the recording, and you can be active in engaging in the content.

Rather than passively sitting back and watching, half falling asleep in your chair, you can have control.

This productivity hack is from my new course, 70 Hacks for Archi students, which I highly recommend you sign up for. It’s free to gain access. The link is above.

Now, please note – this isn’t about rushing through your lectures just to tick them off. It’s about controlling the speed of it right to the point where it’s just fast enough you have to pay close attention to what is being said – but not so fast that you don’t understand what is being said.

It’s about finding that sweet spot where it takes 100% of your attention – your phone should be in another room; no other tabs should be open – you shouldn’t be shopping on ebay or watching Netflix while listening to a lecture. You should be controlling the video so that it requires 100% of your focus. You are being active in what is being taught and understanding the content, rather than just listening to it.

Also don’t be afraid to go back and re-watch something if you don’t understand it. You’re speeding it up anyways, so you make up for any lost time.

Why is this useful?

There’s a principle in the world called the Pareto Principle. Also known as the 80/20 rule.

The 80/20 rule describes how 20% of causes come from 80% of effects. This might seem a bit abstract, so let me give you a few examples. This is relevant for a business where 20% of customers bring 80% of the businesses sales. Or in architecture school, 20% of architecture students make 80% of the High Distinction projects.

20% of the causes come from 80% of the effects.

In this case, 20% of the lecture content has 80% of what you need to know. Meaning, the remaining 80% of the lecture content only contains 20% of what you need to know. This “active online lectures” method is a way to scrub through the lecture to locate the most important information. To find that 20% of content that gives you 80% of what you need to know.

Not only are you shortening the time you spend watching your lectures, where you can sometimes half the amount of time watching them, but you are better understanding the content so that you can actually learn the information that’s your lecturer is trying to teach you.

I encourage you to give this a go. In your next online lecture, remove all distractions and start watching the lecture at a reasonable pace. If you find you’re comfortably understanding what is being said, speed it up, if not, try to maintain that speed and focus harder on the content.

It’s a skill you’ll be getting better at. If you find that you’re not understanding the content, go back a bit and re-watch what you didn’t understand, pause it and slow down to help you grasp it. It’s not about powering through but scrubbing through the unimportant.

Continue speeding it up, pausing it, slowing it down to remain active in your online lectures.