Better Than A Read It Later App — Glasp Is A Read It Now App

How I Use Glasp To Highlight & Take Notes On The Internet

A few months ago I discovered a highlighting app called Glasp that has completely changed how I read articles & take notes.

Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash

For someone who is an avid outspoken person about highlighting you would never guess it would become one of my favourite and most valuable tools in my knowledge management system.

But here we are.

Before Glasp, I would have two windows open in my browser. One with an article, the other with Roam taking notes, it was cumbersome but it worked. Now with Glasp, I just highlight & take notes in the browser window using the Glasp extension.

Highlighting and taking notes in the browser is easy with the Glasp extension. Any notes you highlight appear in the popup window on the right.

But Glasp isn’t just for my highlights and notes. It’s a social note-taking tool. So when I visit Glasp.co I can follow interesting people and see what they are reading, highlighting & taking notes about. And they can see what I’m reading, taking notes & highlighting!

Here are three ways Glasp has transformed my knowledge consumption workflow:

Better than a read-it-later app — Glasp Is A read-it-now app

In all previous iterations of my article reading workflows, I would come across something I wanted to read and save it for later. I’ve tried read it later apps like Pocket & Instapaper. And rigged my own together in Notion & then in Roam Research.

But Glasp completely changed my workflow — for the better.

Rather than saving things for later. If I am reading through an article and something stands out, I can just select it, highlight & take notes all within the browser.

Just highlight a piece of text & the Glasp taskbar will appear. Choose your highlight colour, write a note or send it straight to Twitter.

It helps me to be present in the moment, rather than squirrelling a whole lot of articles away that I may or may not read again.