Research Tips (Chrome)

Hey everyone,   As mentioned at the end of my most recent video, I get messages about what my research process is like from time to time, and as I said then: It's basically just a bunch of reading, listening to audiobooks, then digging through research papers when I need to investigate biological mechanisms or sort out something that doesn't click in my head.
I remember a couple years back watching a video where Elon Musk was asked something like "How did you become knowledgeable about rockets so quickly?" and he said simply "Read a lot of books."
Obviously I'm no Elon Musk, but that idea stuck with me and encouraged me to just start gorging on information.  

Anyways, I said it's just reading, but there are some small tricks I have here and there. Here's one for making easy note taking on web lectures

(Bear with me on the weird one-image-for-the-whole-post thing but Patreon only lets me add one image as a cover then one image in the body of the post.)

1) Download "Video Speed Controller" (Chrome extension) This puts a speed controller on the video (as you can see in the cover image & above at the top left of the video). Speed changing is already something you can already do on youtube, but this lets you quickly decrease or increase the speed by tapping "s" or "d". And, you can go above 2.0x up to 3.0x. I usually listen to talks at 2.0x, sometimes 2.5x if the person talks too slow, and will tap "s" a couple times to slow it down when the speaker is talking about something important.

2) Download the keep extension
I used to take my notes in a separate google document and have the video on one side of the screen and the google doc on the other side, but this got very tedious. The google keep extension is very handy - sits on the toolbar and when you click on it, it will make a new keep entry for whatever page you're on. Pause the video (hotkey space or "k"), write your note and then...

3) Timestamp your notes!!
Right click on the video click "copy video URL at current time" and put it next to your note. This is key because sometimes I won't remember exactly what I was talking about in my notes, and sometimes I'd like to quote precisely what the person said. Since something I read or heard about several months before hand could come in handy for a video I'm working on now, it's important that I can quickly access precisely what I was talking about with that note.

Pretty simple, nothing revolutionary but little tweaks like this have saved me a lot of time. Hope this helps!