Readwise has a lot of great tools to help manage the content you’re reading. I’ve mentioned their RSS reader before, and they do a nice job of pulling over highlights from Kindle and other places.
Ever since I started using it, they’ve been sending these emails called “Your daily Readwise” that I’ve been ignoring. I recently starting using that daily feature a bit more, and I love it!
If you’re a Readwise user you can find it here, and the way it works is quite simple. Every day it will pull a handful of your old highlights for you to review, and it looks like this:
It works a bit like Anki, where it’ll pull in quotes over time so you can get better at remembering them. I treat Readwise quotes as reminders, not as items to memorize. If I really want to memorize a quote, I’ll put it in Anki. For the rest, I’ll just let Readwise surface them for me from time to time to keep them fresh.
Sometimes it’ll pull in a quote that I no longer care about, so “discard” will hide it from showing up again. “Keep” is the default that I click for most of them.
The “Master” button is quite powerful, and you can use that to help remember key pieces of a quote. For example, I could hide the word “afraid” in the quote above, and then next time it shows up I’ll have to remember what that piece was.
This is known as a “Cloze Deletion”, and it’s something that Anki supports as well. If I want to use a Cloze to work on a quote I’ll often put it in Anki, but it’s just so simple to click here in Readwise that I’m finding myself doing it more and more often.
This review only takes me 30-60 seconds a day to run through, but it’s a great way to resurface highlights that I might have otherwise forgotten about. If you use Readwise much at all, I encourage you to give it a shot.
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