For as long as I can remember, I’ve had my head in a book (or Kindle). Books are a gateway to knowledge, wisdom and learning. They take you on escapades to sunny shores and riveting worlds. I wouldn’t be without them and I definitely would find it more difficult to fall asleep at night.

About 10 years ago, my mum gave me a Kindle and, at first, I wasn’t sure how we’d get along, this Kindle and I. Turns out, for someone who consumes books at the rate of knots, a Kindle is an excellent gift. While one got stepped on and went to Kindle heaven and another went kaput with old age, my Kindle is one of my favourite material belongings.

As I read books on my Kindle, I tend to highlight the bits that resonate with me or the bits in non-fiction books which I’d like to action. All of these highlights are accessible on Amazon but I’m never sure what to do with them there. In the past, I’ve printed some and filed them but I prefer a paper-free digital office space. It felt as though I was highlighting and that those highlights would then just lurk around somewhere in the background, never to be acknowledged by me again.

A huge fan of using tools to automate things, I researched whether there was a way these highlights could somehow be synced to a Google Doc, or something, or somewhere that would come to me. There are ways but they’re fiddly and not quite what I was after. Thankfully, I’m not the first to want these Kindle highlights to do more than just lurk about and a few Reddit threads later, I found that people were using Readwise and loving it.

I now know why. And, while I won’t use half of the features (the capabilities blow my mind – you can connect Twitter, Apple Books, medium, Pocket, Goodreads, to name a few), the ones I am using have exceeded my hopes of what I might achieve when I set down this merry path of wondering what I could do to make use of my Kindle highlights.

As a Safari user, I was ever-so-slightly put off by having to use Chrome to connect and sync my Kindle but it took mere minutes for the 206 books I’ve made highlights in to be synced. That’s impressive.

Once synced, I received my first ‘Daily Readwise’; an email that includes some of my highlights. Like this one from Tuesdays With Morrie:

And this one from On Form: Achieving High Energy Performance Without Sacrificing Health and Happiness and Life Balance: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance, Health and Happiness:

In the Readwise settings, you have the option to receive these emails daily, every other day, weekly or never. You can also choose how many highlights you’d like to receive per email at a maximum of 15 per email and what time of day you’d like the email to land in your inbox – I went for 7am so it’s ready and waiting for me when I start work. You can switch this feature off in settings too, but I realllllly like it: the daily digest email can recommend books based on your reading history.

What I like about the email is that it reminds me of books I’d long forgotten about but loved enough to highlight extracts of it. There’s wisdom aplenty in the books I’ve read and there’s a soothing sense that each day my inbox will contain that wisdom for me to revisit and relearn. It’s as if the book keeps giving and living on and I absolutely adore that.

Within the Readwise app, you can view the library of books you’ve made highlights in.

From here, you can review the frequency of when the highlights will be emailed to you, add document tags such as ‘mindset’ or ‘creativity’ etc., edit the metadata, refresh the highlights, export the highlights or delete the book.

While I did delete a few books and I can see how I might at times export highlights for a blog post or when conducting research, I don’t think I’ll use these tools often. I’m more than happy that I’m receiving a daily email with my highlights and a book recommendation.

–> When you sign-up to Readwise, there’s an automatic free 30-day trial period, but if you’d like an extra free month (I’ll get one too), you can use my link (click here). The normal monthly cost is $5.59 (about £4.42) which is roughly the cost of a Costa Chai Latte – I’m happily swapping out one of those each month for Readwise, it feels as though it’s one of those ‘investing in yourself’ things.

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