How to Read More Using Readwise
Reading is the key to learning. The more you read, the more you'll be able to learn. This tool can help you read more.
Reading is the cornerstone of learning.
As more and more AI-powered tools come online, those of you who are able to learn quickly and effectively will be in the best position to capture new opportunities that emerge. Because those opportunities will come with higher wages, it’s incumbent on you to start learning new skills as quickly as possible.
Whether you realize it or not, learning is a core part of how you advance as a modern worker in today’s economy. That means reading should be an integral part of your advancement strategy, especially if you’re trying to grow in your career.
The reality is most people aren’t investing the time they should into reading. According to one survey, the average person spends five hours per day reading their email but only 16 minutes per day reading for fun.
If you’re not reading there’s a good chance you’re not learning. And if you’re not learning, you’re not doing much to give yourself a competitive advantage in the workforce of tomorrow.
One of the key skills that you’ll develop as an active reader is the ability to store and recall information so that you can effectively communicate it to others.
This is a significant driver for AI adoption in the workforce. AI makes it easier to store and find information from large repositories of data. From that information, individuals and businesses alike are better positioned to take action.
Learning how to use AI-powered tools will help you become more action-oriented while rewiring your brain. The ability to lean on AI means you can offload useless information and free up precious mental bandwidth to do more important things.
Think about it: two decades ago you had to memorize phone numbers for everyone you knew. Today you have a robust contact list at the touch of a finger. Developing a process to give yourself more cognitive power will make you a more efficient — and desirable worker — in the years to come.
Readwise is a reading assistance tool designed to help you get better at transferring knowledge. It can be used with digital books and PDFs, and it allows you to highlight live web pages. It syncs with popular database tools to help you create a central repository of everything you learn.
Readwise is an essential tool in my personal productivity stack. I don’t use it to make myself more productive, I use it because I want to know how to leverage new tools to enhance the reading process. I know that the more information that I’m able to absorb and put into practice, the better off I will be.
This article is all about how to become a better reader. It’ll walk you through what Readwise is and how you can use it to learn more while cultivating new skills.
Readwise is a reading assistance tool that helps you capture and store notes when you read.
I stumbled across Readwise after reading Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. The book is all about how to develop a personal knowledge management system. It focuses on building a “second brain” or a series of processes outside of you to help you download and recall information more efficiently.
Readwise is a reading assistance tool that helps you build your equivalent of a second brain. It’s designed to make it easier to read and store information in the process. Founded in 2017, its mission is to:
“To improve the practice of reading through software by an order of magnitude.” (Readwise Blog)
To enhance the reading process, Readwise helps readers capture notes from all sorts of media. This includes ebooks, articles, Tweets, and email newsletters. Once highlights and notes are captured they’re centralized in one place for easy categorization and recall in the future.
A lot of tech products become more of a hassle than they’re worth because they come with a steep learning curve. Readwise takes something you’re already familiar with — a reading platform — and integrates it with tools you’re likely already using.
Readwise can pull your highlights and notes from the following formats:
Kindle
Apple Books
Google Play Books
Instapaper
Pocket
Medium
PDFs
Physical books (I recently tested this out and it worked great).
Once your notes are aggregated, you can store them in whatever personal knowledge management tool you prefer. This includes:
Evernote
Notion
Obsidian
Roam Research
In 2021, Readwise launched its second product, an in-app reading tool called Reader. It’s an extension you can install onto your web browser to highlight live web articles in real time.
Reader also comes with an AI feature called Ghostreader that is powered by ChatGPT. It comes with several prompts including one to create summaries and another to generate questions that help you retain information. Students in particular will find this valuable as they work through homework or study for an upcoming test.
Readwise is quickly becoming a tool that helps you not only read better but become more versed in the art of curating information. Think of it like building your own personal library. Readwise helps you figure out what information to keep and how to catalog it.
As new AI features continue to come online, you’ll eventually have your own personal librarian to help you retrieve and recall information too.
I use Readwise to store notes and highlights on Notion. ChatGPT helps me parse through information quickly to build outlines and summaries.
While new, AI-powered tools are rapidly coming online, these tools aren’t substitutes for doing the work. While ChatGPT can write articles like this, for you it shouldn’t.
The same goes for obtaining new knowledge. While ChatGPT can give you the Sparknotes version of a book you forgot to read before next week’s English test, it doesn’t mean it should.
What tools like Readwise and ChatGPT are good for is creating summaries and reference points to improve how you recall information.
I recently wrote this piece about Nir Eyal’s book Indistractable. Even though I read a paperback version of the book, I was still able to scan all of my highlights using Readwise and transfer those highlights into Notion.
Once all of my highlights were in one place, I provided those highlights to ChatGPT. I asked it to identify key themes from the book as well as action steps offered by the author. I used that information to write an essay about the book (which is another form of information recall I use to retain information).
In the past, I would do all of this by hand. I would read a book and highlight it. Then, I would re-read my highlights. I would hand-write my notes in a notebook (now I use reMarkable). While this process definitely helped me digest new information, it hasn’t been very effective when it comes to recalling information.
Readwise’s integration with other tools and the ability to craft summaries from my notes improves how I access information. It uses my notes to create roadmaps from books. Because I know how the information in a book is organized, it makes it easier to review it or retrieve quotes from it later on.
Combined with the ability to create tags, Readwise also makes it easier to synthesize ideas from a variety of authors writing on the same topic. For example, I can take my notes from Indistractable, Atomic Habits, and Deep Work to look for overlapping themes. If all three authors make the same point, that’s a very clear indicator that they are communicating something very important.
I use Readwise to read and organize information about books because that is literally my job. But there are likely applications for it in your line of work too.
If you deal with PDFs, you can use the Readwise app to create highlights and store them in a tool like Notion. Or, if your job requires you to stay up on the news, you can also use Reader’s web-highlighting tool to retain important information like quotes or figures in news articles.
You can also send email newsletters to Readwise Reader directly to get them out of your inbox. This will not only increase the likelihood of committing time to reading them, but at the same time it will get you one step closer to decluttering your inbox.
Almost any process that requires reading, digesting, and processing information can find a benefit from using a reading-assistance tool like Readwise. Once you adopt it and leverage it alongside AI chatbots like ChatGPT, you’ll find yourself working smarter instead of harder, freeing up your time to do more important things.
What you need to know.
In historic technological revolutions, the tools that would eventually become adopted across society played an important role in augmenting human labor. The steam engine, for example, led to the rise of manufacturing in urban factories and the ability to transport goods quicker and farther away.
This new technology — when applied in specific contexts — made humans more productive. At the same time, it made less productive workers obsolete.
The same thing will happen with artificial intelligence — at least in the short term.
That’s why work as we know it is undergoing a process of massive transformation. C-suite executives are eliminating inefficiencies and with those inefficiencies, jobs. As a worker, if your job is unnecessary, you are inefficient at what you do, and you lack in-demand skills, you will likely be unemployable in the very near future.
While it’s inevitable most workers will acutely feel the impacts of technological disruption by the end of the decade, it isn’t necessarily the end of work itself. The best way to anticipate the changes that lie ahead is to hit the books.
Learning is essential if you want to stay employable. You have to learn to adapt and cultivate new skills. Your goal isn’t to climb the corporate ladder anymore, it’s to become really good at what you do and be the person everyone calls when they need help with that thing.
Reading has traditionally been one of the most effective ways to obtain new knowledge. Yet it’s something people are spending less and less time doing.
Reading comprehension is going to become an important skill to master as work continues to take a new form. The more you can apply new knowledge to your job, the more valuable you will be.
Readwise is a tool that can help you learn new information and recall it quickly. Its integration with Notion allows you to easily store knowledge for future recall. And because Notion has already implemented AI-powered search assistance, you can essentially create your own personal library.
This is what I do for all of my work that is published here. I use Readwise, Notion, and ChatGPT to store and help me process information that I then convert into finished pieces like this.
It doesn’t matter what tools you use in your personal productivity stack but it is important to build one and start mastering those tools.
Just like you’d expect a carpenter to be knowledgeable about how to properly use woodworking tools, knowledgeable workers should be expected to know the tools that help them in their trade too.
What’s your reading practice like? Do you prefer digital ebooks or physical books?
Modern Adult is an affiliate partner of both Readwise and Notion as well as Amazon. Modern Adult may earn a commission if you click on a link in this article. Readers who sign up for Readwise to use the platform for 60 days for FREE.