How I remember everything I read with Readwise

there's many kinds of notes that you want to exist but you don't have to create them that is exactly what read wise does this is a just mind-blowing Treasure Trove of knowledge this one folder called read wise why would I not save and preserve just the gems of insight the nuggets of wisdom that these sources contain I really fought I've pushed aside so many distractions I've dedicated and invested so much high quality attention to consume these in the first place [Music]

I don't usually recommend specific apps my attitude is generally that they're interchangeable but there is one product there is one platform called read wise that is different you can almost think of it like a second brain companion it is this critical almost piece of infrastructure that you can install into your second brain ecosystem that is so

powerful so valuable that it is more or less Irreplaceable there's many kinds of notes that you want to exist you want them to be created but you don't have to create them isn't this kind of the whole point of technology to save human effort so think about the kinds of notes that you'd like to exist that you can automate that you can have it happen in the background automatically with no effort or more importantly attention that thing you already have so little of

required from you you so think about the kind of most typical case which is your reading you read books you read online articles you read blog posts you read newspaper articles that kind of focused aware reading where you're not just reading a tweet or an Instagram caption you're actually taking the time and space to sit down and really think about something really take an idea seriously that is a rare and precious experience

now what if as you were reading you could highlight the best parts the most relevant Parts the most interesting Parts most unusual and surprising Parts the parts that resonate with you personally well you can't you're probably already familiar with this kind of feature whether it's on a Kindle device and you put down your finger and you just move it across a sentence or a paragraph what read wise can do is basically sense or detect when you've made such a highlight and within a few minutes of you making that highlight it

extracts just that piece of text no more no less just the part that you highlighted and it sends it exports it through the internet over to your note-taking app and it can actually do that to any one of a dozen or more different note-taking apps so you don't have to choose a specific note-taking app so that's half of what read wise does that's the first major use case you could call it highlight syncing finds your highlights sends them to your notes out and I did that for years but in the

past few years read wise has taken kind of The Next Step a very exciting step which is they have created what's called a read later app a read later app you can think of it like a digital reading list where do you put and where do you find all the things that you want to get to later that article that is so interesting but you don't have time to read it in the midst of your workday even other kinds of content by the way not just text that YouTube video that is 30 minutes long or an hour long that

demonstrates or teaches some very important thing you want to know but you don't have time in the midst of your busy week to watch that save it to your relator app it could be almost any online Resource as long as it has a specific URL a specific web address can be added to your relator app now why would you want to do that sounds kind of simple and obvious you just compile a list of all the things you want to get to later but this little Act of just it's just one button it's actually a

little plug-in in your browser that just says save as you go through your days and your weeks just hitting save on things what does that do the benefits of that tiny little effortless action are really incredibly profound one thing it does is it removes you from the distracting environment that is the internet most of the internet if you think about it especially social media is not designed for calm deep purposeful reflection it's exactly the opposite right you may find a fascinating very

in-depth piece of writing on social media but if you really want to create the focused reading environment that's necessary you have to take it out of that environment to a separate environment in this case a dedicated piece of software that is designed for that that is clean minimalistic there's zero ads 0 distractions you just put the content that you actually want to consume that you want to put into your mind in a place that supports that kind of

consumption the other thing that that does is it gives you a chance to step away from a piece of content that you thought at the moment would be useful and relevant but often if you time shift it if you save it in the afternoon and come back to it that evening the next day or days later or weeks later suddenly that little bit of time that has passed even if it's just a few hours suddenly gives you almost this sense of objectivity you're able to see it in a

new light you're able to see it without the emotions and the feelings and the distractions of that moment and often the effect of that is you realize you don't actually want to consume it at all you actually gain wisdom about what is relevant and important and what I find is I end up deleting never even looking at maybe half of the stuff that is saving my relater app and it's the half that is most click-baity most sensationalistic most pointless most full of hype that's the stuff that I don't even want to be filling my mind

anyway let me show you what this actually looks like so I'm going to start by going to their website which is readwise dot IO the home page is explanatory showing you and explaining how readwise works but once you've created an account you can go ahead and sign in once you sign in you'll see your dashboard your dashboard is the list of all the different things that read wise does and actually does a lot of things can be a little overwhelming to be honest but let me take you through just

a couple of the features that I personally use the thing to pay attention to here is the first section called connect and sync highlights this is the original way that I used this service and the most important way that I continue to use it today the terminology it uses is Import and Export all this is saying is where is the content coming from what is the source and then where is it going to where is the destination so import export Source destination reading and note taking so

I'm going to go ahead and click import and what you see here is a pretty extensive page of the many many sources that read wise can import from okay I'm not going to go through all of these but some of these are podcast apps or book review apps annotation apps up here um our assess which is a reading format apps other read later apps such as insta paper and pocket you can also import from email from a CSV from PDFs all

these different things so I'll leave this to you to play with I really only use one which you'll see right up here which is Kindle I download pretty much all eBooks on the Kindle service mostly honestly because it connects to read wise that's how important this is so all I did is uh added Kindle as an import source and then it appeared up here at the top where it says connected and you can actually see that I need to click to reconnect so once in a while every few

months or so for reasons I don't understand it goes out of connection this is actually a great opportunity because I'm going to show you what it looks like to sync Kindle with read was so I'm going to click right there it will ask me to sign in to my Amazon account and be sure to use the same Amazon account that you use to purchase the any books in the first place once you sign in to your Amazon account this is what you will see it's called your notes and highlights page this is actually a page that is generated for any Amazon account you have one if

you've ever read an Amazon Kindle ebook you can see the Kindle logo here in the corner and what it does is it gets all your notes which are little comments you've added using the note taking The annotation feature on Kindle and your highlights all the passages that you have designated by the way everything I'm showing you here also works both on Amazon Kindle devices like the actual devices they sell and it works on the

Amazon Kindle app that app is free not just for Android but for iOS so so you can really read an Amazon Kindle book on virtually any mobile device and on your computer by the way so even if you don't have a mobile device or you don't want to read on a mobile device you can download the Kindle desktop app for Windows PC or Mac completely for free the ebooks won't be free but the software to read them incredibly is completely free so what am I looking at here if you look on the left you'll see

all the books that I've read on Kindle and you can probably see there's a lot there's hundreds so I can actually click on any book that I've read in the past here on the left and it will show me every one of the highlights I've made in this case this is the most recent book I've been reading I have 64 highlights so far you can see the passage I highlighted right here there's a location which I could use to look it up in the book if I needed to or even easier I could click right here where it says options and open it directly to that page in the

Kindle app so I can see it in context this only works if you have the Kindle app installed on your same device I can also add a note with my own thoughts or interpretations about this passage or simply delete the Highlight if I decide in retrospect it's not relevant now you might be wondering at this point isn't this good enough isn't this what we're trying to find in the first place a compilation of all our different highlights yes and no yes in that Amazon has already done most of the work they've done a lot of work to

surface all this information but this interface is actually very limited I can do a basic search but not more advanced searches I can't edit any of this I can't add bold underlining highlighting I can't really add my thoughts besides this little note thing which isn't very useful this is a read only it's a consumption format whereas notes really should be something interactive and as the book you see on screen indicates messy right so what we really need to do to get all those capabilities is to get

this content into our Notes app now you could just copy and paste them I could just go here to the bottom click and drag actually no I really can't so it's funny Amazon doesn't really make this easy they don't want you to remove this content they don't want you to take it anywhere because then you'd be less dependent on them it's never really very easy to use in this case it doesn't even really look like I'm able to select the text but even if I could you really don't want to do this manually if you do any kind of significant reading not just do you want

to avoid you know all this meticulous copying and pasting but sometimes if you're like me you start reading a book and then life gets busy or your interests shift so you put it aside and then come back to it later with read wise it will pick up where you left off and begin syncing new highlights even if months or years passes until you get back to that book so you don't have to remember and remind yourself oh I picked up that book again let me go back find the notes in my note-taking app go to

the bottom and keep copying and pasting my notes like oh my God please do not subject yourself to that suffering what read wise is doing doing in this case is just automating that entire process so let me show you what this looks like for this one example okay so for the book messy the power of disorder to transform Our Lives which is kind of a funny a fun example for me to be using I'm just going to copy the title so that I can do a search for it and then we'll head over to Evernote I'll go here to

the search function actually let's see if I just type messy and then search everywhere there is the result messy by Tim Hartford so a couple things to notice this note was created completely automatically I've actually never opened this note the readwise service already got the title and the author put it in the title of this note and then each paragraph you see here is a highlight so for example each of these passages might come from very different parts of the book it separates them so you know that

there's they're different by adding a paragraph separation right there the other thing to notice is the location so there's the number location 82 and you can also click this link and it will actually open within the Kindle app another thing to notice is see this date right here it says update it so what happened in this case is I started reading the book probably for an hour or two and took all the highlights up to here and then I put it aside for a couple weeks and when I picked up again it

automatically added this horizontal line as well as this date this is useful information it tells me okay I ended here and then I picked up reading right here and the cool thing they're really quite amazing thing is I can move this note right I can move it within para maybe I have a project that it's related to or an area or resource in fact I want to move this note I should move this note to where it's going to be most useful and relevant in fact even if I change the title read-wise somehow still

knows the note is there it knows how to find it and it will continue adding new highlights that you've taken no matter what you call the notes no matter what you change the title to and no matter where you move it so you're never going to get that broken link where you start making new highlights in an e-book and it has no idea how to find where that note went now if you look up here at the very top where is this note actually located now where does it begin where is it created in the first place it's in a

notebook which is evernote's name for a folder called read wise so if I click on that this is the default folder where every single highlight that is imported by read wise goes so you can see this is a just mind-blowing Treasure Trove of knowledge I mean if I expand this out this goes all the way back to well it says 2018 but it actually goes back a lot further I think these dates were updated based on some syncing change but this is many many years this is probably over a decade of my high

quality attention that I've spent reading you'll notice too that it's not just books for example this is a book called The Art of gathering but also something we haven't even talked about yet which is articles so if you read an article such as this one and take a highlight which you can do in read wise's very own reading app called reader it will do the exact same thing it looks the same acts the same works the same with an online article as with an ebook so actually many of the items you see here such as this one and this

one and this one and this one are actually imported from online articles or in this case a tweet or it could be all sorts of different websites so we've looked at the import section let's also now look at the export so I'll click here you can see once again there's many options these are all the different places the the destinations that read wise can send your highlights to I personally use Evernote that's why it's up here in the connected section and they're adding more all the time so you

can check back to see if you are not taking app of choice is supported in the future so let me show you what this looks like I actually never have to do this it happens completely automatically but sometimes just to be sure it's working or just to see it working I like to click configure and you have a few options here I have the export automatically one checked so that I don't have to do this manually I also like to include highlight locations compact layout is always nice and I don't want to select items to be exported I want to select all of them to

be exported so if I click Start export to Evernote I'll need to log in once you've logged in you'll see this little spinning wheel and it says exported zero new highlights to zero notes if I had new highlights that it had not yet exported it would tell me right there and like I said the reason this these are both zero is that this happens automatically without my involvement so everything that I've shown you so far which you could call connecting and syncing highlights it was the original the first kind of value add was to

Simply get your your highlights from one place to another but there's a second major way that I use read wise which is much more recent let me now show you the read later app which is called reader that the company readwise launched a couple years ago here's what it looks like you can find it once you've created an account at read.readwise dot IO so this one has some more things that you need to understand reader is a reading list so not surprisingly it is presented in the

form of a list there's a few different ways you can see the items you've saved you can see this home view you can see a feed which actually pulls in items that you're subscribed to such as newsletters automatically so you don't even have to save them but I actually like that step of having to say yes I want to get to this later and hit save which means I like the traditional Library view there's also a few I can think of them as filters over here on the left sometimes you're in a certain kind of mood or you have a certain span of time

or you just feel compelled to consume a particular format of content so this list you see currently is all different kinds of content from podcast episodes to tweets to New Yorker articles to YouTube videos but I can also filter by articles only buy books by emails by PDFs you can see I don't really read emails or PDFs here by tweets by videos you can also make a short list if you want to designate certain items as especially important or you can create custom views so this is

one that I created with all audio so sometimes I don't really care what kind of audio it is like it could be a Spotify episode or a YouTube video or even a tweet I'm not really designating what form of audio it is as long as it's audio it goes in the two listen to filter which is created by a tag that I created called to listen to I'll just show you one example if I click into this item which is an interview with Rick Rubin on his philosophy of creativity let's say I wanted to save

this paragraph right here I could select it with my mouse and then it automatically gets highlighted I don't even have to hit any button I could also add a note or tags but I don't bother with any of that I'm really just looking for the Highlight you can see I've just exported to Evernote manual and it exported one new highlight from one note well guess which one that is let's head over to Evernote and you can see here right at the top of my readwise folder is the title of the original Source the link where it came from and the exact passage that I highlighted I have over

300 folders in my Evernote account this is probably the most valuable this one folder called read wise and I think it's the most valuable because I've done the most work to find this knowledge right something that I wrote down some random idea I had you know while walking in the park walking the dog that has some value but I consider the many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours that I've spent reading all these books and articles to be much more hard one much

more hard fought I really fought I've pushed aside so many distractions I've dedicated and invested so much high quality attention to consume these in the first place why wouldn't I keep them why would I not save and preserve just the gems of insight the nuggets of wisdom that these sources contain so often when I'm looking for an answer to a question or a solution to a problem you know I want to know what Rick Rubin did in his career I want to know what Charles eisenstein thinks about you know

that his philosophy of of eating I want to know how this family did over Landing in the Americas I want to know Kim Stanley Robinson's you know ideas on a future sci-fi scenario in which we terraform Mars I want to go back years and ask Daniel pink what he thinks about how to persuade people and sell them on things this is really like having a a mastermind a council of advisors of most

of the greatest Minds that I've ever had contact with all of which I can search I can annotate with my own thoughts I can incorporate and integrate into whatever I'm writing or creating or trying to think think about or decide on really read wise gives you almost the 80 20 value of an entire second brain with extremely small amount of effort and you can do it for you know a handful of dollars a month which I think is just

one of the best ways to spend your money to make sure that you're capitalizing on the value of something far more valuable which is your attention [Music] foreign or you could delete the highlight what the heck is that breaking out a huge piece of furniture

put it in this trash can it's typical Long Beach it comes from the author in some cases as well oh my God he has more furniture