How To Actually Remember And Apply The Inspiring Stuff You’re Reading.
Do you habitually highlight books whenever you read — saving those precious insights for your “future self” to enjoy and learn from, over and over? It’s almost like endlessly snapping photos, so you can relive those great experiences over and over again.
But honestly, how often do you actually look at those photos again? And those highlights — they were very brilliant insights when you first discovered them, but will you ever “discover” them again?
Turns out, you can arrange for your highlights to automatically come back to you via email on a regular basis, with no effort, using the Readwise app. (Disclosure: affiliate link, which provides you with an extended 60-day free trial.)
It’s super easy to set up once; then it just works.
You need to be reading on a Kindle or other device (even your computer) — which I do the vast majority of the time anyway. Highlighting is simple on the Kindle, of course — just touch and drag to select the passage, then click Highlight on the popup. Kindle automatically saves your highlights (and notes) to your Kindle account on Amazon.
Once you’ve connected your Kindle account to the Readwise app, Readwise will automatically upload your highlights and send you a handful of your highlights every morning, via email.
It’s as simple as that — read, highlight, get reminder emails every morning.
There’s no need to take any further action. Starting a new book? Kindle adds it, along with its highlights, automatically, so Readwise picks it up automatically as well.
In your daily email, you can easily manage each individual highlight, if you’d like. You can “favorite” it, so it reappears more frequently, or tag it, or discard it, if you no longer want to see it. You can share it to Facebook or Twitter, too.
Sometimes, even your own highlights can be confusing, when read out of context. The solution is simple — just click through on the highlight in your daily email, and Readwise will pop up the Kindle app, and take you directly to that exact highlight, so you can read it in context.
There are lots of other ways, besides Kindle highlights, to save great ideas you come across while reading as well. Virtually anything you read online — magazine articles, blog posts, news articles — can be easily highlighted and saved as highlights in Readwise, and they show up in your daily email, just like your Kindle highlights. The same is true for offline reading, like Pocket and Instapaper articles — just highlight them in those apps, and they’ll just show up in your Readwise daily email.
Possibly best of all, you can easily export all your highlights to Evernote, and as files in various formats like including CSV and Markdown.
Readwise could be an indispensable tool to help you remember all those amazing insights you come across, returning them to your “future self” over and over, reinforcing the ideas, and helping you to take action on them.
As one reviewer commented about Readwise: “Kindle highlights without Readwise? Pretty much useless. With Readwise? Indispensable for retaining more, and learning more.”
Want to learn more about Readwise and its many useful features? Visit ReadRemember.com. Or, just sign up for a free trial at Readwise.
Don’t just read — put those ideas to work!