Here's an embarrassing truth: I had a “watch later” list on YouTube that was over 200 videos long.
Not because I didn't want to watch them. I genuinely did. These were channels I'd deliberately subscribed to… people I respected, analysts I wanted to follow, creators teaching things I needed to know.
But 20-minute videos compete with everything else in a day. So most of them just… sat there.
Then I built a fix.
The RSS Agent Setup
Every YouTube channel has a public RSS feed. Most people don't know this, but it's been there for years. The feed updates every time a new video goes live.
My setup in Lindy monitors 20 channels via their RSS feeds. When a new video drops, the agent wakes up, pulls the transcript from the video, generates a plain-text summary, and sends it to a dedicated Slack channel I call “Learning.”
No link to watch. No “save for later.” Just the summary, ready to read in about 90 seconds.
The information density is actually close to the same. Maybe 80-90% of what I'd get from watching. For most content, that's fine. If something is genuinely worth the full 20 minutes, I can still watch it. But that's now a deliberate choice, not a default.
I went from watching maybe 3 videos a month from those 20 channels to reading every single one.
What This Looked Like in Practice
Last November, I walked one of my coaching clients through this setup. Ilias is a structural engineer who also runs an investing business on the side. He was trying to follow 12 research-focused channels… quarterly earnings breakdowns, sector analysis, market commentary. The kind of content where you genuinely need to stay current.
He'd been saving videos to watch on weekends. Watching maybe 4 or 5. Feeling perpetually behind on the rest.
We built his version of this agent in about an hour. Set it up for his 12 channels, configured the summaries to focus on key data points and analyst takes rather than general content, and pointed it to a private Slack channel.
Two weeks later he told me the part that surprised him wasn't the time saved. It was that he actually followed through now.
Because the friction was gone. The summary was just there. Short. Readable. No decision to make about whether to “find time to watch.”
That's the hidden cost of “watch later” lists. Every item on that list represents a small mental tax every time you open YouTube and see it sitting there, unkept.
Two Agents Are Better Than One
The YouTube RSS setup is a good example of what I call the 80/20 agent building approach: automate the high-frequency pain first.
But there's a variation of this I use for research that goes a step further.
For the Asian Efficiency newsletter, I run two separate agents. The first one is the researcher. It runs three times a week — Monday, Wednesday, Friday — using Perplexity to search across several topics, then stores links and summaries in a Google Sheet.
The second agent is the writer. It runs every Tuesday at 5am, pulls from that accumulated sheet, and generates a newsletter draft.
One agent does research. One agent writes. They don't even run at the same time.
Before I built this, I was spending 4-5 hours every week manually doing that research online. Typing in search terms, opening tabs, taking notes, synthesizing it all. It was one of those tasks I always put off until Sunday night because I dreaded it.
Now the Google Sheet has over 1,000 rows of accumulated research. The writer agent has rich material to pull from every single week.
This is the compound effect of automation. The value isn't just in the time saved per task. It's that the work keeps happening whether I'm paying attention or not.
The Format Problem (Not a Time Problem)
Here's the reframe that I think is worth sitting with:
If you have a “watch later” list, you don't have a time problem. You have a format problem.
Video is a great format for some things. For a tutorial where you need to see someone's hands. For a long-form conversation where tone and context matter. For something genuinely entertaining.
But for most informational content… a summary works better. It's faster. It's searchable. You can skim it.
The reason we default to video isn't because it's the best format for learning. It's because that's what the platform serves you. YouTube is optimized for watch time, not for your retention.
There's a version of this I've taken even further. I set up a personal daily podcast from my Instapaper reading backlog. Every morning, a bot pulls my latest saved article, converts it to audio with my voice preferences, and uploads it to a private RSS feed. I listen to it on my walk or during my commute.
Same information I was “going to read.” Just in a format I'll actually use.
That's the pattern. Take the information you care about and change the container.
How to Start Building This
The YouTube RSS agent setup is one of the better starter automations I recommend because it has a few qualities that make automation stick:
- High frequency (new videos every week from channels you care about)
- Clear output (a summary you can read in 90 seconds)
- Low risk (no external actions, nothing breaks if it misses one)
If you're in Lindy, you can build the basic version in an afternoon. Set the RSS trigger, pull the transcript, write a prompt asking for a plain-text summary with 3-5 key points, and route it to Slack or email.
If you want to get fancy, add a prompt layer that filters by topic. So if you follow a channel that covers both things you care about and things you don't, the agent can flag only the summaries relevant to you.
Start simple. One channel. See how it goes. Then scale.
That's the whole philosophy. Life gets better one agent at a time.
Want to learn how to build setups like this? Check out the Productivity Academy — or come to one of our AI workshops in Austin.
