Readwise: Services I love

I have occasionally been obsessed with note taking, creating a "second brain," and remembering everything I've ever learned or read so that I can become a super human smartypants. During one of my dives into that space, I ran across Readwise, a web application and phone app to consolidate notes and highlights from my readings. I've now been using it daily for close to 5 years and I'm pretty confident I like it for a few of its killer features

1. Pulling in highlights from a variety of sources
2. Daily review of highlights on a spaced repetition schedule
3. The new(ish) Reader app

Consolidating highlights

Readwise has connectors to a whole bunch of applications you might use to read and highlight what you've learned (or want to learn). You can highlight on Instapaper, Feedly, Medium, Kindle, Apple Books, and a whole bunch of others, and then pull those highlights into Readwise for regular review. It's super easy to do.

Then once you have your highlights pulled into Readwise, you can also export them through their integrations with Logseq, Roam, NotebookLM, and a bunch of other notetaking applications. I don't often use my highlights outside of Readwise, but if that's a part of your knowledge management process, they make it easy.

Daily review

This is the killer feature that got me hooked. Every day, Readwise sends me a selection of highlights from my archive. You can configure how many highlights you want to review each day, and it'll provide a spaced repetition schedule. It's great because I can highlight something interesting, then have it automatically roll into my review schedule. If there's something I don't want to review, it's easy to discard it from the rotation.

The daily review is a low-pressure way to keep knowledge fresh in my mind. It takes just a couple minutes, but helps me remember the things I want to make a part of my thinking.

The Readwise Reader

For reading and remembering online articles, the Readwise Reader app is the way to go. I had previously been a subscriber to Pocket (RIP) and have tried others, but with Reader bundled with my Readwise subscription, I've gone all-in on that.

Basically it works like this: (1) find an interesting article or video online, (2) click the button in the browser extension, or "Share" it on my phone with the Reader app, (3) Go read it in the Reader app so I can highlight and take notes, then archive it when I'm done.

Using the app has a few important advantages for me. For one, it allows me to keep track of the things I've read. Ever had that moment when you're talking to someone about something you read recently, but you can't remember where you read it or exactly what it said? The Reader archive stores all the things I've read for later.

For two, it's a place to put articles I want to read but don't have time for right now. I'll scroll through my RSS feeds and quickly mark things I want saved for reading, then go back and read them.

(Admittedly, sometimes this leads to me building up a big backlog of things I intend to read, but don't. I've declared Reader bankruptcy a few times and just shoved everything into the archive to start over)

Finally, it's plugged right into Readwise, so I can highlight things in the reader (or even right on the article page with the browser extension), and have it automatically pulled in for my daily reviews.

Conclusion

Basically, if you read a lot of things, and want to remember and review the things you have read, I'd recommend giving Readwise a try. It's been great for me.