Beginning in April 2021, I decided to get back into reading and take up the 52 books in a year challenge. Over the years, I have read multiple books but hardly remember any insights from those books or apply any of those learnings in my life. I wanted to improve this process and started researching various ways to effectively read books . Since I’m using a Kindle to read, I started highlighting books and taking smart notes while reading. In the process, I discovered a tool called Readwise . Readwise is a subscription service that helps you remember what you’ve read using proven techniques. It syncs all your highlights and notes from your Amazon account, Instapaper , and more. Readwise uses a mix of techniques like Spaced Repetition and Active Recall to master the knowledge you have acquired.

My Current Reading Flow

Readwise has many features that have personally helped me remember what I’ve read. Readwise is now an integral part of my personal knowledge management flow. To give a quick idea, here is the reading workflow I use to remember what I’ve read:

• Mark highlights and take notes while reading on my Kindle.
• Export highlights and notes from Readwise to Obsidian (the software I use for personal knowledge management ).
• Review highlights and notes using Obsidian for further research and drafting book note articles.
• Use daily highlights and the ‘Mastery’ feature on Readwise daily for actively recalling important insights from books I’ve read.
• Write a book note on my website using the data from Obsidian after one month.

Why I Like Readwise

As I mentioned earlier, Readwise is a part of my knowledge management workflow. My favorite features of Readwise are the Mastery and daily highlights using spaced repetition and active recall. Below are some of the features of Readwise that I personally find the most useful.

Daily Highlights

Every day, Readwise sends an email with highlights from books, articles, or other sources of information I have synced. I have set this to arrive in my inbox daily at 9 AM. It helps me passively remember small snippets of information from my favorite books. For example, last week I recalled an idea from James Clear ’s book Atomic Habits , which I had totally forgotten. Ever since I started using Readwise in April, I’ve religiously read and reviewed all of Readwise’s daily highlights.

Mastery

The Mastery option in Readwise helps convert any passive highlight into an active highlight by providing the option to review it. Readwise converts highlights into digital flashcards that use active recall and spaced repetition for optimal retention.

Cloze Deletion is a fancy term for ‘fill in the blank.’ With the cloze deletion feature, you can hide any keyword or phrase of the highlight, giving you a chance to pause and think about the word.

The question and answer option in Mastery allows you to add a question and answer for any relevant highlight. This is not automated and is useful for important highlights meant to be mastered in the long term.

Once any highlight is reviewed using active recall, Readwise prompts you to select how often you want to review the highlight. This is an excellent feature and helps in prioritizing the highlights that matter the most.

Tagging

Readwise has a native tagging feature for organizing your highlights across multiple topics. It also has an inline tagging feature that allows you to create tags while using Kindle . Inline tags can be created on Kindle by adding notes while highlighting using the format .tagname. For example, if you want to create a tag for productivity, add a note with .productivity. This is very useful when you’re researching a particular topic and want to easily find your notes and highlights from the books you’ve read.

Exporting

The option to export your highlights and notes, especially in Markdown format, is very useful for me since Obsidian is also based on Markdown. I export my highlights from a book in Markdown format and import them into Obsidian for further research. Readwise also allows you to export your highlights to CSV files, Notion, Evernote, and more.

Is Readwise for You?

I have been using Readwise for two months now, and it is one of those subscriptions I happily pay for every month. You can create an account on Readwise using my link for free (I get 30 days when you sign up), and you will get a 60-day free trial to evaluate the service. However, if you’re not using Kindle or don’t create enough highlights, I wouldn’t recommend Readwise to you. Readwise gets better as you sync more highlights and make the necessary micro-configurations. The habit of creating highlights and notes is essential for using this service.