Readwise to Notion workflow
A foresight research workflow
This was presented as part of the futures & foresight research workflow and techstack overview at the recent 2024 Houston Foresight Gathering.
When I use Readwise
Let’s say I’m surfing the web or reading something online and I come across a really interesting report that’s unusual and I want to save it because it’s going to be super useful for a project I’m working on or a content thread I’m developing.
Anything I find like this that’s worth reviewing later, I’ll save to Readwise , tag it quickly with a couple of global tags and then just keep working. Readwise Reader is a read it later app that keeps my concentration on the main game — whatever I’m working on, and stops me scatting off down some interesting rabbit hole when I’ve got work I need to focus on.
And the kicker for me when it comes to Readwise is the tagging. I can go back later, maybe towards the end of the day and review the content and globally apply tags — which means all the content is tagged in a consistent way which makes it much easier when I want to pull stuff out to synthesize for a particular project.
The objective is always to make information inputs useable and useful. Which means I want to deal with them when I’m ready (not necessarily when I happen to find them), and I want to be able to find what I’m looking for so I can bring it into my project dashboard when I’m starting to develop my thinking and frame up a project.
Note-taking apps
I have two note-taking apps I use and it’s mostly because I like to keep them separate as they serve completely different purposes when it comes to work.
Notion: is for specific project work, output-focused work. Everything that comes into notion is specifically linked to a project or a focused work topic that I’m actively working on.
Tana: is more like a second brand, a node driven networked note app where the objective is to build my thinking, research and networked knowledge over time.
Importing Readwise content into Notion for Project Work
So the Readwise — Notion workflow goes something like this:
a. Capture web or medium articles, kindle highlights, podcast snips, tweets and email newsletter snips to read later.
b. Review later (read and highlight OR bin them if they’re not useful)
c. Apply global tags and make any notes or highlights as I’m reading. I’ll also often tag them if I have an active project in mind.
c. Import them into Notion (which automatically sets up a Readwise database page in Notion) which includes summaries, reference info and all your tags, highlights etc.
d. Move them to a project dashboard in Notion. I don’t store a whole bunch of articles in Notion permanently. When I review the imports I move them to a project dash. If they don’t belong in an active project dash, they don’t stay in Notion, I just delete them (or don’t import those ones in the first place).
Here I’ve imported the Readwise snippets into a project database and by using the kanban view, I can start to organise my thoughts and move the snippets around to support themes, topics or drivers I’m starting to frame up.
