π - I'm reading every day.
π - I create tiny folds in the top right of interesting pages of my books that I want to refer back to later. Once the book is complete, I open a Google Doc, go to the folded pages, and write down the content I want to capture.
πΎ - Books started stacking up in my tiny apartment which nudged me into buying a Kindle. Instead of folding pages, I now save the highlights that I want to refer back to. Once the book is complete I export those notes into a spreadsheet. PROGRESS!
π - Oh right, the internet! All the amazing posts and blogs I follow... let's just say my bookmarks bar is unsurprisingly organizational chaos.
π± - I then scrolled on my Instagram feed on saw Versett recommend a few apps (a great Canadian company): one of these apps was called Readwise.
Readwise collects all of your highlights from your reading and spits out 10 highlights a day for you to go through. You can tell Readwise to keep showing you those highlights or never show them again. You can also 'like' the highlight which gets fed into your "favorites" list. In addition, you can tag the highlights to your liking.
π I fell in love π
Initially, I was skeptical. It was a 30-day trial which immediately turned me off. I thought I would never pay for something so simple for $6/mo or $11/mo.
I was wrong, and here are the two reasons why:
π€― #1: Time to value was mind-blowing
Perhaps I'm a unique case. I read multiple books within my Kindle and was actively highlighting. As a result, when connecting Kindle with Readwise I was instantly fed the 10 highlights, and the time to value was just a few seconds.
10 highlights a day isnβt asking too much of me which resulted in me using the app 10 days in a row.
What about my books with all those folds!? Instead of manually adding highlights into Google Docs I discovered that Readwise can add supplemental highlights from books you've already read. This takes those books and feeds the most popular highlights into your feed. A true aha moment.
It was magic.
My supplemental books:
and here are all of the ways you can integrate your highlights into Readwise:
In addition, they have a chrome extension where you can highlight text anywhere and it will automatically be saved into Readwise. This solved my bookmark problem.
and here is my current list of articles:
#2: Active reading = Better Retention
With Readwise in place, I started to pay more attention to what I highlighted. Knowing you have an app in your back pocket that will store the key things you want to capture is powerful. The more highlights you feed into Readwise, the more valuable the software becomes.
The tagging system allows me to organize highlights from multiple areas into one topic. Today, my tags are as follows:
Instead of looking at a single book, I can combine insights into my "strategy" tag and then export those into Notion and have a resource of all the highlights that add to my learning behind "strategy".
Instead of reading something and never looking at it again, Readwise allows me the opportunity to extract more out of my reading.
I used Readwise for 24 Days out of my 30-day trial
I signed up for the annual plan.
TL;DR - If you read a lot like me, get Readwise.
Itβs built by Tristan (from TO!) & Daniel.
I look forward to more and more updates along the way.
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