You might have noticed I like watching conference talks and recommending my favourites, and you might have gotten the wrong idea about my attention span from that :) I actually have a terrible time concentrating on watching a video if that’s all I’m doing, my mind wanders and when I come back to the video I have no idea what’s going on so I have to skip it back to catch what I missed. After that happens a few times in a row I give up and go do something else.
Fortunately, I have a trick to keep myself focused. It’s kind of a ridiculous trick but hey, maybe it’ll work for you. What I do is open up the talk I want to watch in one window, and in another window I open up a silly clicking game like Diggy’s Adventure or Clicker Heroes and play that while I listen to the talk. The reason having those open in separate windows is important is so you can alt-tab to the talk easily if you want to see the current slide.
For me games like those are the digital equivalent of doodling, they give me just enough to do to stay focused but not so much that I get distracted from the talk I’m trying to listen to. They’re also great for convincing myself that I’m really just playing games with a talk on in the background, which makes it not feel like work so I actually do it.
If you want to watch more recorded talks but never seem to get around to it or your mind wanders when you do get around to it, try a really low impact game. It might help and definitely can’t make it worse :)