How I Created a Digital Brain to Optimise Learning
A guide to collect your ideas, thoughts and highlights then using digital forms of spaced repetition to master what you learn. Learning is a continous process.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” — James Clear
Many of us spend a long time on the internet these days, consuming and learning new things only to forget them because there’s always more new and exciting things to learn about.
In addition to that, we also consume information through various mediums like twitter, podcasts, books, articles and newsletters. It can be hard to keep up with them periodically and when you need that particular piece of information you read a year ago, it can be hard to find it. You know it exists but you just can’t remember where you placed that bookmark or which part of the site you read that information.
I will take you through how I combat this problem and what my workflow is, so that I can retrieve and memorise information efficiently and effectively.
The Flow Diagram
The Tools Needed
Readwise
Readwise is the machine that is going to do all the heavy lifting. In this workflow, you don’t rely on bookmarks or saving information offline. You start by signing up to Readwise and integrating the key sources of your learning. For me, this is books, podcasts, articles on medium and general web surfing. You can download this Readwise (Chrome/Firefox) plugin to help you highlight random articles and text as you browse the internet.
As you can see in the diagram, I use a combination of Twitter, Snipd player for podcasts, Kindle reader for e-books and Medium account for highlights. These are directly integrated into Readwise and it periodically syncs your highlights and any notes you take when you make highlights. I also have Readwise installed on my iPhone, iPad and Mac; so that I can highlight from any device. Interesting article you saw on Reddit? Add key information highlights to your Readwise straight from Readwise app.
Once you integrate your twitter account to Readwise, you can just type @readwise save or @readwise save thread to save entire threads to your Readwise account. Okay, now Readwise is becoming rich with information that we have from medium, web articles and twitter integrated.
Snipd
Snipd is an excellent and free podcast player that creates highlights and shows your transcripts as you listen to the podcast, similar to how Apple Music shows you song lyrics as you scroll through. Once you enter your Readwise account token to Snipd, It’s simple as choosing a particular highlight that you want to learn in the future and Snipd automatically syncs it to Readwise.
Books / Kindle
Readwise can integrate with your amazon / kindle account and sync your book highlights automatically. No more doing 100+ highlights in a book only to never come back to it again. If you don’t have a kindle, you can highlight phrases on the book and use your Readwise app on your iPhone to scan and save the text.
The Machine
Now the magic happens. If you have done all this, your Readwise account will become a repository of all the highlights, podcasts, tweets you found interesting. It’s this giant mess of information that you want to find and go through easily and become smarter in doing so.
Fear not, now we need a way to organise this and go through it every day to master our highlights.
Spaced Repetition
Spaced repetition is nothing but a memorisation and learning technique that counters the forgetting curve.
Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 19th century found that 50% of what you learn is forgotten in one day. 100% is forgotten in 6 weeks if you don’t come back to it. This is the principle behind spaced repetition learning, or in our case, The daily highlights. Readwise has a feature where they send you a specified number of your own highlights everyday. They call this daily highlights.
These daily highlights can be tweaked by
- Highlights you want to be surfaced more or less
- Highlights you never want to see again
- Highlights you want to tag
I set the things that I have highlighted recently (recently read books, articles) to surface often in my daily highlights so that they quickly go into my long term memory and I don’t forget them.
Then, once I look at my daily highlights, I try to tag them based on the same tagging framework I use in Bear. More on that later.
I try to do all my tags for the highlights in the previous week so that I know what to look for when I’m in need of information. For example, if I need to look at more highlights of good examples and learnings for my career, I look at Readwise’s career tag highlights. It has information across twitter, podcasts, books, web, medium.
Final Piece: Bear Markdown App
Every 3 months, I export all my readwise highlights into markdown files with the tags included and I import them all to Bear app. Bear is my go-to note-taking app. It’s available on iOS and Mac OS and is encrypted end-end. This is the place where the workflow ends from tech side. I import all my notes and I don’t have to arrange them or tag them because they are all tagged from readwise. I import them all into bear because I can add my own thoughts and interpretation of my highlights and share with my friends if I want to. I can create and link my highlights with something I learn in my day-to-day life practically and write observations around my highlights. It helps me stay in touch with what I learn and read and not lose them.
This is the learning process that is shown in the workflow diagram above. I don’t set a specific plan like how people usually do, in terms of having 1 day, 3 days and 2 weeks spaced repetition to go through their highlights. I feel like, using bear to surface and write my observations around highlight suits me better in remembering and memorising my highlights rather than trying to memorise for the sake of learning.
Sharing
The final process of this puzzle is sharing. What I learn is, for me to share with others and talk about it, thereby further enhancing my understanding of the topic. If I read about blockchain and my tag has blockchain in it, I make sure to take it out and talk about it to learn from people who are more knowledgeable than I am. In this way, what I learn is further enhanced by real-interactions with the people around me and not just through reading and memorising. Similar to how we used to have homework and all but at the start of every day in school, you always question or talk to your teachers about possible doubts. The sharing process finally solidifies your learning process and you become an expert in the topic within a few months. Then you go on to the next one.
I hope this was useful and if you find better ways to tweak this workflow, let me know as I’m always trying to optimise how I learn. Liked reading this and want to chat more? Feel free to connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.
