Why I'm Trading Highlights for Voice Notes
"What if I need it?"
This is the justification for keeping anything you haven't used in a long time.
It could be mail, books, kitchenware, clothes, or anything else you've accumulated over time.
For me, it's cables. I have cables that would be completely unrecognizable to my kids. Heck...I have cables my wife probably never used. Because..."What if I need it?"
Most other stuff I'm fine getting rid of — almost to a fault. I've overzealously thrown out things that were still very much needed, but that weren't in use the day I got sick of the clutter.
Clutter in the physical space drives me crazy. But clutter in the digital world...I almost never see that.
I'm Joe, and I'm a Digital Pack Rat
I keep everything digital. I have a complicated backup system that includes multiple hard drives, a NAS, and Backblaze.
I fear losing important files and photos, so I never delete anything. After all, whereas in the real world I have to physically look for something, digital files I can simply search for with a few keyboard taps.
The fact that I don't see much of my digital clutter is only part of the problem, though. The other part is the ease to accumulate that clutter.
I'm an Over-highlighter
I distinctly remember studying with a friend in high school. I was making highlights in a book. When she looked over, she saw more neon yellow than white.
"What's the point of highlighting if you're going to highlight everything?"
Since then, highlighting has gotten even easier with the Kindle (especially the Kindle Colorsoft, where you can highlight in different colors). Even worse, the promise of digital highlights is you can access them and find your highlights more quickly.
Case in point: I have a TRMNL. It's a neat E-Ink display that can shuffle through various informational screens, and it's super customizable.
One of the plugins I have is the Readwise plugin. If you don't know, Readwise is a great service that will capture your Kindle highlights, or highlights from websites, organize them, and surface them for you in a way that should help reinforce what you've learned.
They also have an RSS Feed Reader, so highlighting from articles or even PDFs is very easy.
The Readwise TRMNL plugin will display a different highlight from your library every few hours.
The hit rate for "good highlight" is near zero, not because of Readwise, but because I highlight too many things.
With highlighting, I fall into the same trap as I do with cables: "What if I need it?"
As a result, I have a massive library of highlights and a $9/mo bill to make them accessible.
I cannot express this enough: I never reference them.
So what should I do? Enter Tiny Experiments.
Recapping Instead of Highlighting
My system for capturing and referencing highlights is good...lots of people want that. It goes like this:
Highlight something on Kindle.
Readwise ingests and organizes my highlights by Book, Article, Podcast, or even Tweet.
Then Obsidian pulls those highlights into my notes, organized by Book, Article, Podcast, and Tweet.
What I end up with is a lovely list of my highlights, easily searchable:
The problem, outside of never referencing these highlights, is twofold:
I don't take action on them.
They slow down and interrupt the reading process.
So when I started Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff last week, I decided to try something different.
Instead of highlighting every little thing I thought might be useful eventually, at the end of each chapter, I'm recapping it with a voice note.
This allows me to capture how I'm feeling at the moment, which is much more useful to me than random highlights I'd reference with no context later.
And thanks to Whisper Memos + Zapier, my notes also find their way to Obsidian:
Evaluating What Works
The core concept here is evaluating what works. I think it took me too long to realize that I'm not using Readwise for anything anymore.
This is a topic for a different day, but I'm also moving newsletters back to my inbox. Squirreling them away in an app I never check is just not a good way to consume content.
With the realization that I don't use my highlights, I started wondering how I can effectively capture my takeaways from useful books.
I'm going to try while I read Tiny Experiments. I'm excited to see how it goes.
And hey, let me know: how do you capture and apply what you learn?