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.

(I should make sure I am focusing on extracting Evergreen notes rather than quotes.)

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.

Highlighting as Incremental Reading

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.

My System

If a highlight is tagged evergreen or discarded, then I don’t need to see it again and it has been sufficiently processed.

If a highlight is untagged and not discarded, then it still needs to be processed.

If a highlight is tagged saved, then I have made it permanent in some way, but I may have more ideas to extract from it.

If a highlight is tagged evergreen, then I believe I have extracted all the ideas I can from it. For now, evergreen highlights are also being saved, despite not being tagged as saved.

I can simplify highlights by editing them or by modifying the note. If I don’t tag or discard it, I expect to see it again sometime when I will process it again more, likely saving it or evergreening it.

I use the note and other tags to give myself a clue or tools for sorting through highlights as I see them again in the future.

References

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.