How to Retain 10x More of What You Read and Listen To
How often have you thought to yourself, “I read something about that once” but you didn’t know where and you had no way of finding it?
Over my lifetime I have read hundreds of books, thousands of articles and newsletters, and listened to thousands of podcasts. I have come across countless incredible quotes, mind-blowing concepts, and fascinating facts. BUT, until very recently, very little was being retained. Outside of an academic setting, I rarely highlighted or took notes on what I was reading and when I did those notes and highlights went in a black hole.
An Epiphany
In March of 2022, I created an information capture system that has changed my life. All that “in one ear out the other” was no more!
David Perrell and Write of Passage first introduced me to this information capture system. Initially, I was suspicious. It seemed too simple, too good to be true, and only for people writing online.
BUT I had no system, and learning about David’s system quickly made me realize how much time I was wasting with my reading and listening, how little I was retaining. So, what the hell, any system is better than no system!
So here is the system that I put in place. If you want to go deeper with this system, check out Tiago Forte…
The Technical System
Here are the tools that I put in place to automate the system as much as possible.
Evernote: There are countless note-taking tools out there, I find Evernote to be the most user friendly and requires no in-depth training. Thanks to the tools below, all your highlights can automatically sync to Evernote!
Instapaper: Install the Chrome plug-in and smart phone app and save any online articles that you want to highlight to Instaper with the click of a button. Then leverage Instaper to read and make highlights. Pro-tip: Your Instaper account has an email that you can use to forward any email newsletters you get.
Kindle: The go-to app for digital books, leverage Kindle to highlight all the books that you read.
Airr: Transcripts for podcasts so you can highlight and pull in your favorite podcast moments.
PDFExpert: My recommended app to highlight PDFs, and then email them to Readwise.
Otter.ai: A powerful voice transcription tool to make a transcript of meetings, conversations, or simply your verbalized thoughts! You can then export the transcript to your notes.
Readwise: This is where the magic comes in. Readwise pull in all highlights from Instapaper, Kindle, Airr, PDFExpert, notes from Otter, saved Tweets, and Medium and then sync those to your Evernote, all automatically! If you have other preferred ways to read digital books, Readwise probably connects to it.
Organizing the Chaos
So the output of all these technical tools is a very unorganized collection of highlights. The good thing is, they are all in one place and they are searchable in Evernote. So, even if you don’t further organize these highlights you can still get a ton of value out of this system.
One easy way to start wrangling all of these highlights is to create hot and cold notebooks. Hot notebooks are specific topics or projects that you are focused on right now. Cold notebooks are topics of interest or perhaps future project areas, but nothing that you are actively working on. You would likely only have a handful of hot notebooks and could have dozens or even hundreds of cold notebooks.
As you filter through the synced highlights from Readwise, you can quickly move specific articles, books, highlights to either a cold or hot notebook.
Additionally, leveraging a process called progressive summarization will help pull out the most critical things in your Evernote. As you read your highlights and notice the most interesting and compelling ideas, bold them. If you come back to a bolded idea for a second time, highlight it. Next, if you are continuously coming back to an idea or set of ideas, summarize them with a brief. Finally, if something continues to pique your interest, remix the ideas into your own words adding your own context and interpretation.
Evergreen vs Ephemeral Content
The first and most important lesson I learned was to focus my reading and listening time on evergreen content rather than ephemeral content. In today’s world there is an endless amount of content created in the last 24 hours, that is the content the majority of people are consuming daily, and it has little to no use or value in a very short amount of time. Meanwhile, evergreen content will be relevant and interesting for years to come. Evergreen content may have been created last month or 100 years ago, you will know it when you see it or hear it.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consume ephemeral content, just limit it. Moreover, I’ve found it useful to pick one or two sources to go to for ephemeral content, to help filter what the most important news of the day or week is rather than try to do that sorting for you. Find one person on Twitter or one newsletter that pull out all the important stuff on a particular topic, rather than wading through the endless muck of news dribble.
Don’t Read on Your Phone
One easy way to limit the ephemeral content is to limit reading on your phone. First, it is very hard to highlight on your phone, so your info capture system doesn’t work as well. Second, there are countless apps and distractions on your phone and many take you down ephemeral rabbit holes. An easy way to avoid that is to limit the reading on your phone. One thing I’ve learned to do is to use my phone to make quick decisions on what I want to read. I may save a few Medium articles on my phone and skim a newsletter to see if I want to go deeper, then I turn to my iPad or computer to go deep and highlight.
You Don’t Need to Finish Reading What You Start
Another big epiphany (and obvious in hindsight!) was that you don’t always need to read an entire article or book. With books, try to read as much as you can on Amazon (or your go-to online bookstore) before buying the book, to make sure the style and content will keep you interested once you buy it. If the free content doesn’t hook you, chances are you shouldn’t buy it.
Same with articles, just because you start it you don’t have to finish, if it’s garbage don’t waste more of your time. One rule of thumb I have is how much highlighting I am doing, If I find myself wanting to highlight everything that is a great sign (but don’t highlight everything, that defeats the purpose). On the other hand, if I find myself highlighting nothing, I should probably cut my losses and move on.
Lastly, with articles and digital books (or printed with Indexes) you can search for specific topics and go right to them. If you are in a time crunch or you are really only trying to pull out a specific idea, jump right to that section(s), be surgical. You don’t have to read the entire thing, you aren’t getting graded on a book report. If it grabs you, you can come back later.
The Outcome - Magic
So, like my initial impression, you might be saying to yourself that this all sounds too good to be true. This information capture system can’t be that game changing!
For me, it was truly magic. Within a few weeks of using this system, I have thousands of highlights across over 100 books and articles, including all prior highlights I had made in Kindle over the past decade.
I was giddy. I was shouting it from the rooftops. I told my wife about this system three separate times before she finally told me to shut up.
To highlight the power of this system, I have been thinking “what if I could go back and have this system for the past 10-20 years”. My life and career would be in a different and better place, I would have saved an insane amount of time, and I would have retained far more valuable content. I would 5 or 6 figures to go back in time and build this system 10-20 years ago.
Furthermore, this system gave me the confidence that writing and sharing thoughts really isn’t that hard. And with this system as my foundation, I launched a regular online writing practice.
Lastly, this system has fundamentally changed how I read, consume, and collect information in just a handful of weeks. I’ve been told that the impact exponentially increases over time, and those that have been using the system for over a year get more and more value over time. I can’t wait!
If you read, this system is for you
You may be wondering, is this system for me? If it isn’t clear yet, I believe that this system is for anyone that reads, has the ability to consume information digitally, and wants to retain and organize that information better than they are today. If you are reading this article, I can almost guarantee that this system will be beneficial for you.
A big shoutout to Write of Passage for teaching me the basics of the system and to Building a Second Brain for developing much of this system.
Consume, capture, retain, and write! Good luck!