Watch Later is where YouTube videos go to disappear. Try this instead

Watch Later starts with good intentions. Then it's 400 videos long, and the one about pricing your freelance work is somewhere in the middle, and you can't remember what it was called.

Why Watch Later stops working

• No real search. You can scroll, and on a computer you can use your browser's find on whatever has loaded. That's it.
• It's a queue, not a library. Watched and unwatched sit together. The videos you actually want to keep get buried by the ones you'll never watch.
• It has a ceiling. Like every YouTube playlist, it tops out at 5,000 videos.
• You forget why. A thumbnail and a title don't tell you which part you wanted, or what it was for.

Clear it out first

Open Watch Later and use Remove watched videos from the playlist menu. Then be honest: anything older than six months you haven't watched, you probably won't. Remove it. It still exists on YouTube if you ever need it.

Save the keepers somewhere searchable

For the videos you want to come back to (a talk, a tutorial, a recipe, a workout) save them somewhere that searches what was said.

With Pro, SaveSearch reads a YouTube video's captions when the video has them. So you can search for a phrase the speaker said, even if it isn't in the title. Add a note like "the bit about pricing at 12 minutes" and that's searchable too. Each result tells you why it matched, so you know whether it was the captions or your note.

On a computer, click the SaveSearch button in Chrome while the video is open. On iPhone or Android, tap Share in YouTube, then choose SaveSearch. You can also paste the link at use.savesearch.app.

Keep Watch Later for what it's good at

Watch Later is fine for "tonight, on the couch". Use it as a short queue and keep the videos you'll want again somewhere you can search.