Readwise

Not only does this app serve as an incredible tool for retaining and revisiting insights—it is constantly being updated and improved, bringing new features to transform your interaction. It’s an excellent antidote to continuously scrolling social media—providing a continuous scroll of actual insights and ideas you have highlighted. Recent features take it even further: the ability to ask questions of your highlights helps surface insights and connections across your reading. And now, the Daily Review has been super-charged with an audio version that is so thoughtfully built you’ll find it a friendly and insightful way to begin the day. It’s like listening to a morning podcast made up of hand-selected meaningful facts and passages. This one app has found a way to lift all of the knowledge, perspective, and wisdom from books and infuse them into the digital mediums we swim in every day. How lucky we are to be in a time when the great writers, researchers, and practitioners throughout history can be encountered in a digital scroll on the phone, a penetrating search at the desk, or on a morning commute. Thank you to the team that keeps this app—and the books we read—not only alive, but thriving.

I have been a huge fan of this app for years. I found it through Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain course back in 2020. And have been using it to track all my highlights in Kindle and other sources for years now. My reading habits soared with the ability to recollect and use this info I was consuming. It changed my life, my businesses, the way I interact with the world. My thoughts are more processed now. And with the addition of AI chat, it has blown my mind. It’s an easy way to essentially consult with all the people’s voices I value. I can ask it any question and generally come away with insights I wouldn’t otherwise have surfaced without a lot of time and effort. But it’s all at my fingers tips. It’s truly wild to be able to do this. It feels like unlocking a whole new world. I can’t wait to see what the next chapter holds! I love Readwise. Hands down my favorite app of all time!

I am currently studying for a major exam, and I must say that this app is awesome at bringing up the information based on your feedback/settings for each book and article that you import. Also, with the Mastery feature, that is definitely helping with the recall of information over time. I have found that it is best that you sync your information via their Readwise iBooks app that is installed on the Mac so that the highlights from your Books app, as well as any PDFs that you are reading (which I’m seeing works best with the latter if you simply a) highlight your PDFs while having the Readwise app active in your browser, then b) copy and paste those highlights, one by one, into Readwise’s Freeform Input area to ensure proper translation between the PDF and Readwise, but I digress…). If you are attempting to study for an exam, or even to recall what has been taught in a class from a book that you are reading, I highly recommend this app!