As I’ve mentioned a few times on here, I have a handful of tools that I use every day. I mentioned some like Anki and Feedly last year, but now I’m adding Readwise to the mix because it has a great small feature that not many people notice.
My main goal for each day is to still get Anki and Feedly to zero, and I generally am able to accomplish that. When they’re done, though, they’re done. They have a fixed end, and you’ve hit zero. You can “study ahead” in Anki a bit, but it’s not a great thing to do on a regular basis.
Often when I’m done with those and have some time to kill (waiting for the doctor, before a football game starts, etc) I’ll drift into social media. That’s an easy way to go and I’ll still often do it. However, I’m now trying to use the Readwise “Daily Review” tool a bit more.
Readwise
I work hard to remember content from the books I’ve read. I have this blog, we have a monthly virtual book club, and a podcast that shares knowledge from them. I’m always looking for ways to refresh my memory from those books, and Readwise is a big help.
Readwise has a lot of tools, but the main one is to automatically pull in your highlights from Kindle. From there, you can visit your Readwise Daily Review page and it will show you five of your highlights to review. They show up one at a time, like this:
You’ll notice four icons below the quote that it pulled.
- Discard: Don’t show me this again. It won’t remove the highlight itself, but will hide it from showing up in future daily reviews.
- Master: This allows you to select some words to be hidden the next time it comes up so that you’ll have to fill in the blanks and learn a bit more.
- Feedback: You can tell it to show this quote again “Never”, “Soon”, “Later”, or “Someday” to adjust the pace.
- Keep: Just the default for “yep, good quote, show it again some other time”
They’ll also sometimes show additional quotes (“A supplemental highlight from a book you’ve read”) or recommendations from new books based on what you’ve read, like this:
I have Readwise set up to email me a reminder every morning, so I’ll at least do one set of five quotes per day.
When I have extra time beyond that everything else, I’m trying to make Readwise reviews the default. I’ll still spend some time poking around social media as well, particularly if my brain is shot, but this is a great tool to add to the list.
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