Best Way To Watch Anime In Least Amount Of Time

When do people stop watching anime? After college? After marriage? They stop when they hate themselves for watching 7 days straight and haven’t gotten jack shit done.

Still, I love watching anime and there are so many good ones to choose from this season. Here are a few that I recommend checking out for Summer 2015:

Shokugeki no Soma — Left over from last season, if you like food, you’re going to like this.
Himouto! Umaru-chan — Hilarious slice-of-life (so far).
Akagami no Shirayukihime — Reminds me of Spice & Wolf.
OverLord — A funny SAO? Possible.
Gangsta — Reminds me of Cowboy Bebop, Black Lagoon, Trigun.
GATE — Interesting parallel universe. Otaku. Seinen.
Arslan Senki — Left over from last season, epic fantasy adventure, like 12 Kingdoms.
Shimoneta — Hilariously ecchi. Think B Gata H Kei.
Charlotte — From the creator of Angel Beats!
Working!!! — Cute slice-of-life working in a restaurant. 3rd season.
GOD EATER — Just bad-ass, if you like large swords, guns, and monsters. Adaptation of a PSP game.
Rokka no Yuusha — High quality Mayan adventure.

How much time would it take to keep up with all of these? Assuming 25 minutes per episode, 13 episodes per season, you’re looking at burning at least 65 hours. That’s some serious commitment and it’s probably time you’d like to use productively on whatever meaningful endeavors you’re pursuing.

My strategy is the equivalent to picking flavors at the ice cream parlor. Dozens of mini-spoons will lay waste, but a few awesome flavors will survive.

Start by watching or skimming through every first episode. That’s about 5 hours. A solid day’s work. Now, it’s time to start dropping, like AT&T.

In any given season, I’m probably following 3–4 solid series. My top picks are ones I’ve memorized release schedules — not on purpose, purely through Pavlovian conditioning — and I look forward to watching them freshly subbed. The quicker you find these gems, the less time you’re wasting. So, I can get pretty ruthless when it comes to dropping a show, but a word of caution, there are shows with lackluster pilots; I dropped Gurren Lagann and Angel Beats! initially, but when the general consensus disagreed, I went back and watched two amazing series.

After the first episode, this is when you decide whether to try its second episode. By now, I’ve usually dropped 5–6 shows. Whether it’s the artwork or the premise, these are my “insta-drops”. This isn’t E, so don’t worry about dropping too much. You can always pick them back up if the inter-web raves about it.

Episode #2, let’s say you decided to continue with 7 shows. Attack of the Pantsu is gonna cost you about 3 hours. We’ve logged 8 hours so far. Easy. A nice all-nighter can take care of that.

Now’s the hard part: deciding which to drop and which to continue. My motto is: when in doubt, drop now. Life’s too short to stay hanging.

By Episode #3, you’re looking at 4 shows. That’ll be 100 minutes and if they’re all keepers, you’re looking at about 19 hours.

From 65 hours to 27 hours, you’ve more than halved the amount of time necessary to watch your favorite anime and skipped all the Neon Genesis-esque psycho-babble.

Apply this over an entire year and you’re looking at saving nearly a month’s worth of full-time work!

Comment below and tell me how you tackle watching anime!