Yeah, I've been doing this too, but only after I've determined something to be too boring when I try to watch it normally. I'm glad I didn't watch Puella Magi at 2x, for instance.
Another tip: Youtube can be watched at 1.5 and 2x, as well as slower speeds, but you have to go to testtube first and enable the experimental HTML 5 player.
(Currently it seems a little bugged: if you select a higher speed, you can't go back to 1x, because the normal speed button doesn't work. Reloading fixes that.)
I've been looking for a way to do this automatically. Whenever I start a video, I have to manually change the speed to 2x; sometimes I forget and end up wasting large amounts of time. I've been looking for a chrome extension or something, but I can't find one.
Has anyone had any luck with automating this?
Thus spake Eliezer:
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.