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A year ago I vowed I would never use Readwise…
How Readwise Became An Indispensable Part Of My Knowledge Management Workflow
I’ve been known to be opinionated about Readwise. In fact, a year ago I wrote an essay titled: Why I Refuse To Use Readwise.
This is why writing this article surprises me as much as it might surprise you.
I actually don’t have anything against Readwise. It’s highlighting I have a real problem with.
Specifically, thinking you can simply highlight a few passages and use spaced repetition to magically synthesize them into your brain without doing any real thinking. Because for the last 20 years that’s how I had done it. I had a mountain of highlights and clippings but no real knowledge and certainly no original ideas as a result of all that consuming.
So I had to break the habit of highlighting.
Readwise only made the behaviour I wanted to break even easier to do so I resisted using it for a long time. But now I’ve firmly built the habit of taking notes in my own words (rather than just highlighting things) I’ve been enjoying using Readwise as a conduit to get those notes into my writing inbox so I can focus on what matters most — turning those notes into knowledge.
