Your YouTube watchlist is out of control. Here's how AI can clear it.

Welcome to Prompt, Tinker, Innovate—my AI playground. Each edition gives you a hands-on experiment that shows how AI can sharpen your thinking, streamline your process, and power up your creative work.

This week's playground: Taming your endless video queue

Your watchlist is a graveyard of good intentions. It’s filled with everything from quick tutorials and product reviews to hour-long podcasts and keynotes. The sheer volume is overwhelming. You know there's valuable knowledge locked inside that queue, but you'll never find the time to get through it all.

This is where AI shifts from a novelty to a necessity. Use it as a screening tool to tackle the video firehose. Instead of letting your watchlists grow into an unmanageable source of anxiety, feed your queue of videos into tools like Gemini to get instant summaries. This allows you to quickly decide: "Is this worth my full attention?" "Can I get the gist and move on?" or "Are there just one or two key moments I need to see?" It transforms an overwhelming backlog from a source of stress into a curated library of insights.

Your AI experiment: Try this prompt

For this specific experiment, you'll need to use Gemini. Its native integration with YouTube is the magic that makes this all possible—a capability other AI tools can't replicate.

👉 Time to tinker: First, a critical setup step: You need to connect Gemini to YouTube.

• On a personal Google account: Go to your Gemini settings, select 'Apps,' and make sure the 'YouTube' extension is toggled on.

• On a business/Workspace account: This feature may need to be enabled by your IT administrator. If you don't see the option in ‘Apps’, you may need to check with your IT department.

Once that's set, grab a link to any video on YouTube. I tend to go straight to my "Watch Later" list of conference keynotes, product tutorials, and an embarrassing number of videos on building the perfect city in Cities: Skylines II. (Don't judge my traffic management.)

📝 Prompt: “Analyze the YouTube video at this link: [Paste YouTube URL here]. From the video, please provide the following in a clear, well-structured format:

1. Main thesis: In 1-2 sentences, what is the central argument or primary purpose of this video?

2. Top 10 key points: List the 10 most important takeaways, concepts, or conclusions presented in the video.

3. Most notable moments: Identify 3-5 of the most impactful, surprising, or memorable moments from the video. For each moment, briefly describe what happened and why it's significant."

💡 Pro tip: Don't stop at the initial summary. Use follow-up questions to dig deeper. Try these:

• "For each of the 'Notable Moments', can you provide the approximate timestamp?"

• "Based on the video's content, who is the intended audience? Explain your reasoning."

• "Turn the 10 key points into a short, engaging LinkedIn post."

What did you discover?

Pull a video from your watchlist that you've been putting off for weeks. Did the AI summary give you the core value in a few seconds? Did it help you decide to watch the full video or confidently archive it? How much faster could you get through your queue using this method? Share your experience—and maybe the oldest video in your watchlist—in the comments!

Until next time—keep tinkering, keep prompting, keep innovating.