Paste a YouTube link, get a stack of study cards in 30 seconds

I have a row of "watch later" YouTube talks on my machine. Each one easily runs half an hour, each one I figured would be useful, and each one is still unopened.

It is the same disease I wrote about with read-later: saving takes a second, but turning it into something in my head gets billed to future me. And future me is usually just as busy.

So I tried to push the cost of starting as low as it would go.

I paste the YouTube link into kofnote and wait about 30 seconds. That video becomes a stack of cards: a summary that covers the point, a few standalone key points, and a few questions I can quiz myself with.

The difference is not that I saved the runtime — I did not. The difference is that I now have something to come back to. That link used to sit in a bookmark as a wall you had to block out time for; now it is a few cards I can skim in 30 seconds and, if something lands, go back to the original.

What it is good for

Talks, tutorials, interviews, explainers — the kind where someone is actually talking and the content has structure. It pulls from the captions and content, so videos with something being said work best.

What it is not for

Music videos, pure visuals, videos with no captions or little spoken content — it has nothing to grab, and forcing it just produces a stretch. It is not magic; it turns spoken content into a shape you can return to.

And it does not replace actually watching the talk. If the video really matters, you still have to watch it. It handles a different problem: keeping the "maybe important, but I have no time to judge right now" videos from rotting in a bookmark.

Saving was never the hard part. Coming back is. This at least gives the coming-back something to land on.