Trying to Remember Everything
Building the Ultimate Information Retention System
I like to read. I’m obsessed with trying to remember as much as I can from what I read. Whether it’s been clipping newspapers as a kid, typing into a Word doc as I studied in college, or even tracking currency news in a ridiculous blog while working in trading, I’ve long been trying to create the perfect information consumption system.
The technology enabling these borderline compulsive behaviors has gotten better and better. I can only dream of the entire “read later” industry having existed when I was in college. I’ve played with Pinboard, Instapaper, Pocket, Del.icio.us, and every other shiny, new piece of information machinery that comes my way. I even get emotional over Kindle Highlights. However, its seems natural that the product that serves me best is the one that promises to help you “Remember Everything”.
This may seem a bit intense, or maybe just pointless, but this is how I currently use Evernote as the Ultimate Information Retention Tool.
1) Use the Evernote Web Clipper to ‘clip’ the article text into a ‘Simplified Article’. Save to the relevant folder with the tag “To Read”.
This leads to the increasingly popular behavior of rarely reading articles as I’m surfing around the web, but instead just trying to determine if an article might be interesting to read later.
2) Instead of reading as I surf, I like to set aside dedicated blocks of the day. I’ll open up a folder and filter by the ‘to read’ tag. This gives me my queue of articles to wade through. After I’ve finished reading an article, I change the tag to ‘read’. If there’s nothing worth remembering, the article gets deleted.
3) I’ve always highlighted while I read, and Evernote’s highlighting functionality was one of the updates that has made this system semi-functional. As I read, I highlight stats, quotes, facts, great writing…pretty much anything I might want to remember.
It was almost two years after I bought my first Kindle that I discovered there was a dedicated site that extracted and aggregated all my highlights, and it instantly reminded me how powerful the practice of highlighting can be. It can instantly trigger that original intellectual or emotional journey, even allow you to re-read a book, all in the span of a few minutes. (Note: Bookcision is a great tool for your Kindle Highlights.)
4) I’ve been desperately trying to find some way in Evernote to automate the extraction and aggregation of my highlights, but it’s not quite there yet. I did manage to find a temporary solution though.
Once a week, I’ll take all articles from the past 7 days with the tag ‘read’ in a folder and aggregate them into one large note. I found a guy in Nepal on elance who charges me $3.50 an hour to go through and copy and paste all highlighted text into one document. It usually takes him around 2-3 hours. He does great work and very happy to provide a referral.
That’s the system, and I have been loving it. Now in my downtime I just swipe through the “master” aggregated notes that are chock full of gems. In one subway ride, I can now relive everything I read in the past week. Stories come back to me, sentences come back to me, people come back to me, all before I get out at Fulton St.
It’s not perfect and it’s not as cheap as I’d hope, but in the meantime, I’m one step closer to achieving Evernote’s promise to help me Remember Everything.
If anyone could build something to automatically extract the highlights, would be very happy to pay.
