Ok folks, I went looking for some videos talking about reefing.
What I wanted to see was footage of people taking a reef in when it's howling, because on my boat which has a high boom and a very wide, open cockpit tidying up the reefed sail is difficult and bluntly hazardous. I'm not the world's tidiest sailor but it occurs to me that if it's howling windy you want your slabs tidied up nice and tight to avoid having a big bubble of sail just blow out and start flogging everywhere.
What I did find was a group of people advocating reefing off the wind, which is the opposite of what I was taught (RYA syllabus). This makes sense from a risk reduction perspective - no boom, sail, sheets flogging around but I cannot imagine trying to lash sail to my boom off wind in waves and a blow, it'd be bloody dangerous.
Thoughts and experiences please!
I can't see how it would be possible, let alone neat and tidy. If it's really howling, I might go beam on and let the main flog to enable getting enough foot tension, but to tie the reefing lines to the boom ... You'd have to come up on the wind once you got the foot and luff tight. You could do most of the tidying whilst still beam on, then bring it up onto the wind driving on the headsail and tie your bundle lines semi close hauled.
I remember running with a fully reefed main in 60-70 knots and 10m+ seas. The main wouldn't budge up or down due to pressure. Beam on or going into the wind was not an option for the sake of the boat, so we rode it out for a day and a couple of accidental gybes until the main ripped in half, alleviating the pressure to allow us to drop the main and run on storm jib only. 
A 34t displacement hull ketch surfing at over 20 knots was a thing to behold!
DM
Downwind reefing is pretty simple but can be tough on gear. I pull the mainsheet in to try to get as much of the mainsheet as possible away from the rigging, and monitor the sail carefully as it goes over the spreaders.
Whether upwind reefing is a hassle depends on your setup to a large extent. It's much faster and easier IMHO to use a luff reefing line which means you just drop the halyard to the mark, pull down the luff reefing line and then pull in the leach reefing line - you don't have to fumble getting a flapping sail around a tack hook and then re-hoisting. Reefing takes less than a minute singlehanded on our fractional rig 36'er with Harken luff cars, and that's using the cunningham as a luff reefing line rather than having a dedicated reef line.
One problem with downwind reefing is reaching the aft end of the reefed portion of the sail, but if you have a stack pack mainsail cover the reefed section sits quietly inside the cover. Otherwise using a single line run through each reefing eyelet seems to be faster for me than using a bunch of them in the old-fashioned way; you can reach up, stab the end of the line through the eyelet, and then crouch down away from the boom while pulling the line taut and moving to the next eyelet, rather than standing near the boom all the time. If the boom is bouncing excessively while you're bundling up the sail then something is going wrong somewhere else.
It's pretty easy with lazy jacks, battened main and mainsail luff cars.
Soak down a bit. Set traveller to put the boom over port/starboard quarter. Ease mainsheet a bit to take the pressure off.
Drop the halyard, attach the reefing tack line, tension halyard. Grind in the reef line.
Take up mainsheet and ease traveller.
All done.
It was the mainsail cars that made the difference. If I got overwhelmed single handed, you could just soak down and dump the halyard. The main would be down in seconds. I couldn't do that with a bolt rope or slugs.
Edit: Chris reminded me of something. Dick around with headsail/kite trim to narrow the slot and put wind behind the main, it helps keep the main off the spreaders.
