# Readwise A website / app that manages highlights across a whole range of document types, has some weird (?) [[Spaced repetition]] system around it, which is actually quite fun to use, and a [[Readwise Reader]] app that I started to use in [[2022-12-27]] (well a bit before that, but that's the day I started writing about it). ## Notes ### Notes from [[Mastodon]] (From [mnml mnl (he/him): "I've been using Reader by Readwise all day to rea…" - Hachyderm.io](https://hachyderm.io/@mnl/109588971985017748)) > I've been using Reader by Readwise all day to read and highlight sections, and it's been quite fun. The great import into Obsidian is really neat, and I could crosslink to so much I highlighted. > I normally don't highlight because unless painstakingly transported into a digital document, it does nothing for me. What I do normally is print things out on paper with big margins, and start writing all kinds of nonsense in there. > In some way I have a "discussion" with the document (or its author, or myself), and this helps me not only focus my ADHD brain, but a fair amount of chunking is done. I later then go over it and lift the couple of ideas that are worth keeping into a digital document. > The downside is that often, the actual meaning of the document is not preserved, and I just write down my own biased ideas. And the other is that I don't have good quotes, but good quotes are actually great in blog posts. > Highlighting and quoting and readwise is a new way of working, and it definitely doesn't feel natural, nor am I entirely clear if there is value for me there. It's been nice to have a place with a queue of articles and knowing that at least the fact I read them is going to be preserved (and even synced into my vault). I have like 1200 links stuffed into todoist but because it's friction to go in there and open up a browser and obsidian and take notes, I rarely do it "on the go". > I would sit down on weekends and process all the stuff I've jotted down as "should read one day", and get through 10 of the 1200 links over the morning, so of course I never got very far. With Reader I feel I can just mindlessly scroll through the stuff I saved, realize that I don't have that much interest for it after all, and still preserve the one or other nice sentence in there that I can later in Obsidian cross reference. I will often get through 20-30 articles per day that way! ### Notes from Discord Some notes about [[Readwise]] (from [[Bob Doto]]'s discord): > so one thing i like about reader now that i've used it a bit more. I would before stuff all my "i should read this, this is interesting" into todoist. And then on the weekend, spend 4-5 hours in a coffee shop going through them, and writing things in my vault, and I would have todoist and a browser and obsidian open. > Being like I am, I would overheat my brain and usually just start yeeting out ideas and drafts and all my usual stuff and not go through the links. Which is fine, but also not what I set out to do. I'd get through 10 links during my stay at the coffee shop. > With reader, I can kind of "gamify" going through saved articles, while being on the couch or whatever. I just scroll through them, maybe highlight the shit I found interesting, which is kind of disengaged, but I can also easily pull up a highlight and actually write stuff about it. This way, I get through 30-40 of the links I save during the day, in fact it seems to have replaced social media to some extent. > And because it all gets saved into my vault directly, I actually just need to do the linking part, and I use the shorthand "ZK" in my notes when I want to turn something into a ZK card. > in a way the low-calorie content of just highlighting is a plus, here, because a lot of that material can't afford more than that right now. better highlighted and filed than not read / processed at all because it's lingering in todoist