How long does it take to tour the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh if you have Mona Winks?

The Rijks had a handout of their top pieces of art and locations that I used. Excellent.

I understand Mr. Rick is developing "Verdi Succinct" - an audio guide to opera.
Rigoletto is twelve minutes long (with an intermission). You don't miss anything. Vino non incluso.

Both could be done within half an hour if it is only to »tick off« Rembrandt's Nightwatch, Vermeer's Milkmaid and Van Gogh's Sunflowers. I would call that minimising your time and not maximising it.

I thought the Van Gogh museum barely had enough Van Gogh paintings to justify its existence. I hope they close the museum down and distribute its contents to other museums.

The Rijksmuseum occupied me from the time it opened until it closed. I wish I had brought my own food in a bag, left it at the coat check desk in a locker, and eaten it outside rather than spending an hour and a half walking and taking a tram to find some lunch far from the museum and then returning there. Take a little notebook, write the names of the artists of the paintings you like, and look up the artists later. You don't have to be in a darn hurry to rush through a museum just to say you visited it.

I understand that some people use wikipedia articles to take away their need to visit a museum.

When a guidebook writer picks the highlights of a museum, those pieces are just the writers opinion of what he or she liked best. Form your own opinion.

Big art museums may be organized according to time period (medieval, renaissance, baroque, modern, and so on), possibly style (portrait, landscape, impressionistic, sculpture, and so on), artist, and so on.. Before you arrive, or just after you enter the Rijksmuseum, pick up a museum map. Identify the galleries or rooms you most want to see. See those rooms first. Then you can decide whether you want to see more or skip the rest of the museum.

If your Mona Winks book is 20 years old, it can describe paintings but can't guide you room-by-room. All museums move things around occasionally but the Rijksmuseum was significantly remodeled before reopening in 2013 and the Van Gogh museum also did a (somewhat faster) remodel around the same time. Rick's latest versions of his self-guided museum visits are in the relevant city guidebooks, such as Amsterdam & the Netherlands, 3rd Ed (published in Oct., 2018).

I was just thinking of what Laura mentioned — I had the idea that at least one of the museums had been revamped since the book was published.