by Josh Catone (MASHABLE)

Allow me to lay a scene: It’s 7:00 am. The kids need to be fed and bundled off to school. The toast is burning. The cat just knocked a pile of papers off the counter, and you’ve got a big presentation to give in an hour and you haven’t even begun to prepare. Okay, so that bit of fiction certainly doesn’t describe all of us, but there is a universal truth to it: our lives are busy and hectic and we have little in the way of spare time. So how can we ever find the time to actually learn something new?

This list of web-based resources will point you toward web sites that will help you learn how to do new things, stay on top of current events, and learn about topics where your current knowledge may be lacking. And these resources will do all that in under 10 minutes each day. Do you know of any other sites where people can absorb quality, new information in under 10 minutes? Add them in the comments!

1. 5min

5min bills itself as a “life videopedia,” which essentially means that it aggregates and hosts instructional and DIY how-to videos from sites all over the web. The site hosts tens of thousands of videos on everything from cooking to ethics, from fighting the common cold to living with cancer, from parenting to playing the guitar. Though the 5min moniker is a bit misleading — many videos on the site are longer than 5 minutes — most of the content is under 10 minutes long, meaning you can easily absorb educational nuggets of information during your lunch break.

2. MonkeySee

MonkeySee is another instructional video sharing site that invites experts to share both amateur and professionally created how-to and advice videos. Though many of the videos are over 10 minutes in length, they’re broken up into short 3-4 minute segments, allowing you to view them in chunks whenever you have spare time. The site is also unique in that videos come with printable transcripts, can be downloaded to mobile devices for on-the-go viewing, and include biographical information about the expert to help you determine if this is someone you’d like to trust to teach you something new.

To read about the rest, click here.