How Readwise has changed my Note-Taking Process
Readwise is an app that allows you to store all of your highlights from the web as well as eBooks in one central place. It allows you to recap your highlights as often as you want, as many as you want. It has integrations for tons of websites, web services, and even apps like Snipd, which allow you to take notes from podcasts. With the smartphone app, it´s even possible to scan information from paper and store your information in your Readwise with just two or three clicks.
As it´s more on the pricier side with approx. 100$ a year. I hesitated to get this subscription for years. But when I purchased it, everything within my PKM system changed. It simplified a lot. Now every highlight I take online and every PDF I read can get into the system with just three clicks.
What makes Readwise so powerful for me are these additional apps/services:
Reader: their read-it-later-app. You can add any website, any PDF and it even transcribes spoken text from Youtube videos into a readable text. It is integrated within the Readwise subscription and allows you to send emails to your account and subscribe to RSS feeds. You can add eBooks in different formats as well. This makes it my preferred capturing tool and reading space for my non-Kindle eBooks.
Browser extensions: Readwise and Reader. These plugins allow me to save and highlight every website I am browsing.
Android apps for Readwise and Reader. The first one I use for my doing a recap of 10 highlights every day. When I don´t know what to do I try to read in the Reader app instead of scrolling through social media. This habit has helped me to break my addiction to social media almost completely, as I prefer reading over scrolling. It helped me to get rid of Instagram, which is a high achievement for me.
Official Plugin for Obsidian. Obsidian is my central note-taking / 2nd brain app of choice. Being able to sync something I read on my smartphone to the app on my computer within seconds is life-changing. One note has all highlights from one piece of content, such as a book, a PDF, or a blog post… But the app has one main disadvantage: if you delete a note or change the title, you´ll get a new copy when it syncs the next time. But you can change everything within the note, which is an acceptable trade-off for me. How I handle this problem is explained in this post.
As a result, my note-taking (adding thoughts from other people) is very much streamlined. I barely write down stuff I find online anymore. If I do, it´s usually a single phrase from an episode of anime or movie. I can comfortably say that 95% of my note-making is outsourced to Readwise these days.
Now I focus more on adding my thoughts about what I´ve captured, which is called note-making. I extract concepts from the Readwise notes, visual note-taking (either digital or on paper, depending on my mood), reflect on them, create ideas about what I could do, try out, use the practical pieces of advice in everyday life (such as highlights from authority-websites) …
And I try to connect a lot. In Obsidian all you need is a double set of square brackets to create a link to a note. You can create links to headings within a note as well. I use this as a way to challenge my thinking during my sensemaking sessions. Usually, these sessions take like 10–20 mins. When I reach the flow-state I´ve spent two or three hours non-stop with this stuff.
These sessions have a very simple structure: open a random note (through a plugin), either extract something and/or connect it to another note. It´s fine to create a trash note as well. Non-negotiable is linking with the daily note as well as adding at least one thought to every note I work with.
This way I try to spend a bit of time with an active recap on my Readwise notes (almost) every day, which helps me to generate more ideas and plans for life and for this blog. As I have a full-time office job I don´t want to spend every spare minute in front of a screen, thus I try to focus on working with like 5–10 notes from Readwise a day during workdays to prevent overwhelm.
Because when you can add anything into your PKM without any barriers, you have a high risk of over-collecting and adding almost interchangeable highlights regularly. Some people say that you need to curate the information you add to your system carefully. But to be honest: I am not as careful as I should be. Thus, I allow myself to eliminate redundant notes and just keep what feels meaningful. Even if it means to keep an empty Readwise note.
One area where I want to improve myself in this regard is the connection between my paper journal and my Obsidian setup. I do add the collections from Bullet Journal as a photo into Obsidian, but I´ve barely linked them… Work in progress, I guess.
