It occurred to me lately that a lot of the information around digital efficiency must already be available on YouTube. I checked. Here’s what I found (and my reasons for advising against using YouTube to learn what you need to know).
Lead generation
YouTube is used by a lot of online content creators to generate leads. In other words, they provide some ‘free’ content, give the video an amazing title that promises the earth, moon and stars, and then proceed to tell you all about how you can access what you need to know by joining their membership site, buying their course, joining their mailing list, attending their webinar, buying their book, or whatever.
It’s not in their interests to provide the good stuff for free, so they don’t.
Promises, promises, promises
The titles used on YouTube videos are, when you think about it, pretty nonsensical. Here are a few examples:
- This Productivity System Will Save Your Life
- This Simple File Management System Changed My Life!
- My Simple Productivity System (for normal people)!
- The ONLY 3 Rules You Need For Better Digital Organisation
- How to Organise Your Digital Life in Seconds (PARA Method) | Part 1
Yes, you read that last one right – this solution can be implemented ‘in seconds’.
Hilarious.
Here’s the playbook for writing YouTube video titles – 3 Secrets for Writing Click-Worthy YouTube Titles – and you’ll see (if you bother to look at that) that the basic premise is to use ‘curiosity, fear and desire’ to motivate viewers to click on your video.
(There’s obviously also a rule about capitalising almost every word in the title, but that’s for another day.)
Bloated, padded content
The videos I watched this morning (or, more correctly, I listened to them while changing bedclothes and doing laundry – maybe I should make a YouTube video called “The Multi-Tasking Methodology that will Change Your Life”) were, on average, about 10 minutes long.
In that 10 minutes they, on average, made two useful points, and then proceeded to give a ton of examples of how to put those points into practice.
Simple ideas made complicated
One of the videos I watched (‘This Productivity System Will Save Your Life’) had an extremely basic message (which I will come to in a moment).
I want to point out, though, that the video had:
- 8 minutes and 42 seconds of content
- 1,700,000 views (yes, 1.7 million)
- 72,000 likes
- 1,860 comments
If that many people have watched it, liked it, and commented on it, then it must be AMAZING, right?
Except it isn’t.
The message in the video is, quite simply, “Use checklists”.
Yup. “Use checklists”.
Needle in a haystack
According to this article, 500 hours of vidoe are uploaded to YouTube every minute worldwide. That’s 30,000 hours of video uploaded every hour. And 720,000 hours of video are uploaded every day to YouTube. To put this into perspective, it would take you close to 82 years to watch all the videos uploaded to YouTube in only an hour.
I’m sure there’s good stuff out there, but how exactly are you supposed to find it (and how long will it take you)?
Conclusion
I’m not against YouTube. There is so much information on YouTube that, statistically, some of it must be useful. However, an awful lot of it is over-promising, under-delivering, time-wasting, common-sense, advice, and finding the good stuff isn’t easy.
You can probably learn digital efficiency using free online resources, but it will take you a long time, which isn’t very efficient. 😁😜
You’re most likely better off paying for personalised targeted tuition to get fast, focused, effective results.
Click here to get free personalised digital efficiency advice from Paperless Academy, and join hundreds of others in making massive efficiency gains in a short space of time.