I’ve always been a big reader. Each year I set goals for what and how much I want to read, and I track everything on GoodReads. One of the biggest challenges for readers is remembering what we’ve read. Have you ever had a moment where you remembered a bit of a story or idea that you once read, but you had no idea where it came from? It’s happened to me many times.
Through the years I’ve tried many different systems to make sure that I remember, and can locate, what it was that I’ve read and found helpful. When I was a young pastor, after I would read a book I would go back through it and type out quotes and thoughts I had as I read. This obviously took some time, but it was a great solution. This second time through a book allows the major takeaways to become more sticky, which is the whole idea. I actually just located the folder I labeled “My Book Summaries” on my MacBook, and there are over 40 documents.
This addresses one of the issues – that of how to truly internalize what you’ve read. But while it took the best ideas from books and put them into a digital document, it didn’t provide a great solution for easily locating those ideas at a later date. The bigger problem was that as I got busier with work and life, I quit taking notes this way.
The Kindle was a real game changer for me. I’ve never owned an actual Kindle, but I’ve been using the Kindle app for a long time. I actually purchased my first Kindle book way back in 2009. I say it was a game changer because once this technology surfaced, I began reading just about everything digitally. I preferred digital over physical for two reasons. First, I didn’t have to worry about running out of room on my bookshelves. Second, I could highlight important things I read, and then cut and paste those highlights into a word processor doc. So that’s what I began doing. It was way faster. It unfortunately did not have the same impact as when I would read the book the second time and actually type out those notes. But the positive was that I had highlights for many more books.
This summer I started writing the curriculum for a financial workshop I led at my church called Mastering Money. I decided to use Ryan Holiday’s Notecard System. The gist of the system is that you wait a couple of weeks after finishing a book, and then you go through that book a second time and write down the things that impacted you most. So I bought 4×6 notecards and a box to hold them, and then I set out going through every book on money that I had read in the past. I wrote down quotes, questions, big ideas, etc, and in the top right hand corner I would give the card a tag. Once I had gone through all of the books and had several hundred cards, I set out to organize the cards according to tag. From there I started writing the curriculum. This made the daunting task of writing the curriculum for a three hour workshop way less daunting, and I’m so glad that I went through the process.
At the end, however, I decided that this system had some drawbacks. First, my handwriting is terrible. I would write a few sentences on a card, and even I would have trouble reading it! Second, it takes a lot of time to write. I am much faster at typing than writing. Finally, what happens if I lose those cards? I wanted a digital solution.
A few months ago I was introduced to Tiago Forte through the All the Hacks Podcast. It was through this podcast interview, and through further reading about Tiago, including his great book Building a Second Brain, that I began to take steps towards creating a system for remembering and easily recalling what I’ve read.
This interview first introduced me to the app Readwise. I started out with a two month trial, but after a few weeks of using the app I became a paying subscriber. Readwise imports highlights from Kindle, Pocket, Feedly, Instapaper, Apple Books, Twitter, and many other platforms. Every morning, at the time I specified when setting up the app, I receive an email with five random highlights from books I’ve read. It’s fun to read this quick email and be reminded of the books that I’ve read through the years.
Here’s why I love Readwise. When I’m reading in the Kindle app on my iPad, I can add a one word note that begins with a period (.contentment, for example), and then that becomes a tag in Readwise. So just as I sorted those physical notecards by the tags I gave it in that upper right hand column, now I can do that digitally. It’s going to take some time to go back through my books and add those tags, but that is my plan. Once I’ve done this, I’ll be able to go into Readwise, select a tag, and I’ll see every quote or note that contains that tag. It will be so helpful when writing a sermon or article.
Here’s how I’m currently using this system. I recently read the book From Strength to Strength, by Arthur Brooks. It was one of those books that I knew I would want to go back to, so I opened a Apple Notes doc on my MacBook, and had my iPad next to it with this book pulled up. I had a browser tab opened up to this book’s highlights in Readwise. I began to reread the book, and when I would come across something that I highlighted, if it was still meaningful, I would add it to Apple Notes. If it was the entire highlight, I would simply copy and paste it from Readwise. Since I had not started tagging at the time I first read the book, I also used this time to add those tags. Once I was finished going through the book this second time, I had a doc with my main takeaways.
Readwise recently introduced Reader, which is their own RSS reader app, so now I can do the same thing with articles. If I start reading an article online that I think is going to be a good read, I immediately send it to Reader, and I either read it from the Reader app then or save it for later. In the Reader app I can highlight and add notes and tags, and those highlights, notes and tags then sync to Readwise.
I’m am really excited about this new system. Reading a good book is great. A book can provide inspiration, information, or simply fun. It can give you that one idea that takes your life in a new direction. But now I’ll be able to go back to what I read days, weeks or even years before, and allow it impact me once again.