Right now, I have 37 tabs open in my browser. I'm not proud of it. At least eight of them are YouTube videos. There's a guitar tutorial paused at 4:17, a two-hour lecture on CSS architecture I swore I'd finish, and a woodworking video where someone makes a beautiful dovetail joint around the 12-minute mark.
The problem isn't finding the videos. It's finding the bit I need inside them. My brain's recall for random timestamps is, frankly, a bit rubbish.
The Great Lecture Debacle
It all came to a head last month. I was trying to remember a specific concept from a Python lecture. I knew the video. I could almost hear the presenter's voice. But finding that three-minute segment in a 90-minute video? Impossible.
I spent 25 minutes scrubbing through the timeline, my frustration mounting with every misplaced click. I eventually found it. By then, I'd forgotten why I needed it in the first place. The whole exercise was a spectacular waste of time.
Browser Bookmarks: A Flawed Solution
My first attempt at a fix was naive. I'd bookmark the video at a specific time. You know, copy the URL with the &t= parameter. It worked. Once.
The flaw was obvious immediately. What if I needed five key moments from one tutorial? My bookmarks bar would be a mess of identical page titles. "Part 1 at 3:45", "Part 2 at 15:22"... it was unsustainable. And trying to find a specific bookmark six weeks later? Hopeless.
It was a system designed to fail. And it did, repeatedly.
Building a Tool for My Own Chaos
So, I built something. For myself, initially. I called it Timestamp Bookmarks for YouTube. The premise was simple: save multiple points in any video, and give each one a label.
That guitar tutorial? I could bookmark the intro at 0:00, the chord change demo at 4:17, and the strumming pattern at 7:45. I'd label them. Suddenly, I wasn't losing my place anymore.
I added a keyboard shortcut - Alt+S - to save a timestamp without taking my hands off the keyboard. It felt seamless. For long, dense videos like lectures or documentary deep-dives, it changed everything. I could effectively create my own table of contents.
The Unexpected Benefit: Actually Finishing Things
Here's the thing I didn't anticipate. This wasn't just about retrieval. It was about consumption.
Before, watching a long video felt like a commitment. If I got interrupted, I'd lose my thread and often abandon it. Now, I could drop a bookmark where I left off. "Resume from here." Simple.
I could also flag bits to revisit later. A confusing explanation? Bookmark it, label it "Re-watch this." A brilliant quote? Bookmark it, label it "Save for blog post." It stopped the frantic tab-hoarding. I could close the tab, knowing I could jump straight back to the good bits.
Is it a perfect system? Not quite but then again, what is? It only works on YouTube, obviously. And you have to remember to use it, which sometimes I still forget. But when I do, it saves me from that awful timeline-scrubbing purgatory.
My tab count hasn't magically dropped to zero. Old habits die hard. But those eight YouTube tabs? I've closed seven of them. The information isn't lost. It's just bookmarked, labelled, and waiting. And that feels like progress.