READWISE VS INSTAPAPER HOW TO

Instapaper: Anytime I come across an interesting article or newsletter, I save it to Instapaper for later reading.Kindle: Readwise automatically syncs my highlights to its platform.Let’s take a look at how it works for each medium: Readwise solved this problem by aggregating every highlight from all of my information sources directly into their web app. But keeping up with and organizing notes and highlights from different media sources gets messy when done manually. I’m also interested in capturing ideas I discover from articles, Tweets, and even audiobooks. While this feature alone has greatly improved my capture efficiency, I find trying to type notes on a Kindle less than ideal.Ĭapturing ideas also isn’t exclusive to just physical books and e-books. Reading books on Kindle or another e-reader device makes highlighting passages as simple as a swipe of the finger. Thankfully, capturing has become much easier with e-books. While not the most efficient, it was an effective way to capture the most relevant information. My traditional way of capturing ideas was by marking up a physical book with a highlighter and taking notes with index cards and a pen. It’s called Readwise, and it helps you get more out of what you read by resurfacing your most important ideas and creating repeated opportunities for you to use them.īut before I explain what all Readwise can do, let’s break down my reading workflow both before and after I started using Readwise. Whether it’s making connections between seemingly random ideas to create something new or gaining sudden inspiration to act on something that you’ve read, you want to convert your hours of input into meaningful action.Īnd while you could perform all of these steps manually, there is a tool specifically designed for improving every stage of your reading workflow. It’s about engaging with your ideas until you truly understand them. Integrate: The final step is about turning the ideas you consume into working knowledge. The review process should be quick and simple to perform while also consistently exposing you to your most important ideas. After all, what’s the point of investing a lot of time and energy towards capturing ideas if you never plan to do anything with them. Review: The next step is to review the information you’ve captured. Instead, you organize the actions you’ll need to take based on the decisions you’ve made about what needs to be done.” -David Allen “You can’t organize what’s incoming-you can only capture it and process it. You need to have a system for funneling ideas through a common channel that’s easy to access for later review. These could be the ideas you discover while reading books, articles, and tweets or even random ideas sparked from interesting conversations. Like the books you choose to read, your reading workflow will ultimately be unique to you, but it can effectively be broken down into three steps:Ĭapture: Collect any meaningful ideas using a reliable system, so you don’t have to keep track of them in your head. To get the most out of books, you need a system for transforming what you read into meaningful action and lasting insight. If you want to optimize for understanding, you need to see reading for what it really is: only the first step in a larger process. But if you really want to understand something, you can’t stop there. Reading for understanding is inherently flawed because it’s based on the faulty assumption that we learn by transmission-absorbing knowledge by reading words on a page. Perhaps books aren’t to blame, but rather, it’s how we read that makes learning inefficient.

READWISE VS INSTAPAPER HOW TO

So why is it so difficult to remember what you read? How to Remember What You Read

They’re also incredible at transferring knowledge through space and time. But books are, without a doubt, still one of the best tools for learning how to do something or for understanding a new concept. Have you ever read a book that inspired you to take action, only to have your motivation fizzle out a few days later? Or maybe you tried to explain a concept you recently read about only to discover that you can’t recall more than a few vague ideas.įor the number of hours it takes to read a book, you’d hope to earn a better return on your investment.

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.' -Carl Sagan Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.

But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.

Readwise vs instapaper