How to use YouTube wisely.

Sivakumar R
3 min readNov 22, 2020

There is no doubt that YouTube is great if you use it wisely. It’s very helpful like “How to install Ubuntu 20.10”, “How to make biriyani”, “How to hack google”, “How to learn python in 5 minutes” !.

Like everyone knows, YouTube has cons and pros. And i am not going to talk about how YouTube makes us addicts, how AI has working for that. Because you may think “I already watched The Social dilemma.” If you didn’t watch it, please watch this Netflix documentary.

Here, I am going to talk about how we can control YouTube from consuming our precious time and make it useful for us.

Use subscription page instead of home page.

After a long period of working or studying, you are feeling bore and typing just “y” in address bar and enter. You are now in YouTube.com and scrolling down. Wait a minute. Don’t do that. Click subscriptions and explore there. You will only see videos from channels what you interested like brightside, TED, What if etc. It will make you escape from trash videos in home page and it’s recommendations.

Subscribe wisely

For making above point to work, you have to subscribe channels. But wisely. While exploring in YouTube, you saw a video of troll/ comedy. You laughed from stomach and decided to subscribe the channel. Again “wait a minute!”. You have to think about that “Is this channel useful for me?”. Don’t subscribe every channel if you just liked it’s one video. Don’t press notification bell for every channel you have subscribed. Explore good channels related to your work and interests.

Watch what you want and stop there.

You got one doubt while learning new things, as usual you searched in YouTube “What is quick sort algorithm” or something. You got recommendations one by one from our dear YouTube. After one hour, now you are watching “How American elections works?” Don’t forget why you are here.

Clear watch history frequently

You got some free time and decided to explore YouTube. You saw lot of good, bad and ugly recommendations. Now your watch history is like fruit salad or aviyal( A south indian dish of mixed vegetables) and YouTube has saving for best recommendations for you to waste time. You can stop it by clearing the watch history. Now your YouTube page will be free of recommendations from your history. If you follow first point every time, this is not required. I am still trying follow that.

Use options in YouTube mobile app.

Actually YouTube is respecting our time and providing some good options in mobile app.

  1. Set reminder for break.
  2. Set bedtime reminder.
  3. Customize your time for getting notifications
  4. Check your stats and analyse.

Conclusion

YouTube is great place for learning new things and seek new information. Like every social media, YouTube is inducing us to use it for long time. Because

So control your mind from attractive captions and well “photoshopped” thumbnails. Again, make it useful for you.

Thanks for reading.

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Sivakumar R

Self-taught developer 🚀 | Lifelong learner 📚 | Experimenting in life's laboratory 🔬 | Aspiring writer 📝