Readwise as incremental reading
Readwise becomes a holding ground for anything from my readings that I might want to turn into Evergreen notes. This means that, as much as possible, if I find something interesting while reading, I should try to send it to Readwise. If I’m not able, my next bets are to put it into the Raindrop as inbox for webpages process, or the Apple Notes as inbox for transient notes process.
Readwise acts as a Spaced Review for your highlights, so by highlighting anything I might find interesting, I allow Readwise to do the work of choosing what I should be converting from a highlight to Evergreen notes.
Criticially, this reduces the burden on reading. Now my reading is only required to be a filtering of ideas and highlights that I will later think about and process more formally. But while I’m reading, I don’t need to worry about whether I’m digesting something fully, or taking great notes. As long as I’ve highlighted and left enough of a note to resurface the ideas I was thinking about while reading whenever I see this highlight and note again, I’ve succeeded.
This provides a lot of the benefits of Incremental Reading. Except for the part where the reading is actually divided and scheduled for you, I still have to do that on my own for now. Also, the highlights are not presented in order of the reading, which is an issue as well.
This also allows me to read on my phone, since reading is really about getting interesting highlights that I will later (eventually) turn into Evergreen notes.
This is opposed the Andy Matuschak idea that Use phones to collect and triage, not (usually) to read.
I can liberally highlight paragraphs and sections and look at them later on Readwise. This means I can do multiple passes on Readwise, once to read the passage I highlighted, and edit the note down (i.e. “extract”) a part of the highlight for later review. Then when I feel a highlight sufficiently encompasses an idea I want to note, I can turn that highlight into an Evergreen notes (and also one day add to a Spaced Review).
This is not the same Incremental Reading as described in Supermemo, but it carries over a lot of the important aspects. The bigger aspect that is lost is the preservation of order and the ability to read a text both incrementally and sequentially.
Read twice, use second reading to only read highlights and create notes: https://zettelkasten.de/posts/barbell-method-reading/. This is essentially what is being done with Readwise, except the second reading is done in a Spaced Review.