How to Engage With Content You Read
A few months ago, my friend Saul Munn (who ran memoria.day) introduced me to an app called Readwise. I’m now pretty much convinced that if you’re not using this you’re making a mistake. I’m gonna talk about readwise, spaced repetition, and how I want to engage with content in general.
Read-it-later systems
Most people have some system for saving articles to read later. For some, its an ever-growing list of open tabs on their desktop, for others its a file in their notes app with a list of books and links. Getting a bit more advanced, many have probably heard of basic “read-it-later” apps like Instapaper, Pocket, or Raindrop.
A nice thing about these tools they’ll usually have a simple shortcut (mine is “command+shift+s”) to save whatever url you’re currently on. Then, when you’re on the train, waiting for your food to heat in the microwave, or winding down in the evening, you can open the app and see all the articles you’ve been meaning to get around to. Readwise can also sync with your Substack or RSS inbox, so articles you subscribe to can be automatically added to your feed.
There are many times when opening X or Instagram is more immediately gratifying than remembering an article I was meaning to read, so I spend time scrolling when I wish I was reading. In general, I’ve found that most of my willpower issues are friction issues in disguise. The nice thing about read-it-later apps are that you always have a frictionless, curated feed of high quality content. If you make it super easy to open your phone and have a great time reading articles without having to do any work to filter or dig around, it becomes a lot more fun and you end up doing it a lot more.
Plus, it makes it way easier to find old articles you’ve read in the past.
Why spaced repetition is awesome
Living as a human is basically a state of constant cosmic horror in which your memories are constantly being deleted, corrupted and modified every waking moment. If you don’t write something down, you will forget it. -Connor Leahy, 30 reflections
This fact is horrifying, and it’s crazy we accept it. Re-read that quote, then sit for 5 sections in silence until this shakes you to your core.
I can’t help but feel a massive sense of loss that I won’t fully remember my first days of college, first time falling in love, and my first time living on my own. Let alone how much energy it took to train GPT-4, if it’s concave or convex, or the names of top officials in the Department of Commerce, even though I spent precious time learning this stuff.
Now that’s set in, I’m gonna tell you some of the best news you’ll ever hear: the forgetting curve is approximated by an exponential
So it might be that the first time you learn something, you’ll forget it after 1 day. After you review it, you’ll know it for 2 days. Next, you’ll have it for 4, and so on. But the crazy thing about exponentials is that eventually they start growing really fast, and pretty soon you’ll almost never have to look at it again.
Take a flashcard, for example. If you make a flashcard out of something, It only takes a few seconds to review it each time. Gwern did the math here, and it’s safe to say that a card’s average lifetime is somewhere around 5-10 min! So basically what this means, is you can remember anything with just 5-10 min of work over your entire lifetime.
It seems like this should completely change how we live our lives.
Incremental reading
Each year, hundreds of thousands of students study Molecular Biology of the Cell. The text presents endless facts and figures, but its goal is not simply to transmit reference material. The book aspires to convey a strong sense of how to think like a cell biologist—a way of looking at questions, at phenomena, and at oneself. For example, it contains nuanced discussions of microscopy techniques, but readers can’t meaningfully try on those ways of thinking while they’re reading. Readers must carry this book’s ideas into their daily interactions in the lab, watching for moments which relate to the exercises or which give meaning to the authors’ advice. This model of change is brittle: the right situation must arise while the book is still fresh in readers’ minds; they must notice the relevance of the situation; they must remember the book’s details; they must reflect on their experience and how it relates to the book’s ideas; and so on. -Michael Nielsen, Timeful Texts
What’s the #1 most interesting or intriguing concept you’ve read about this week? Will you remember it? What are the odds that you remember this very blog post a few months from now? Or even just remember it two more times after putting it down?
I used to read a ton of random blogs and news articles, but I had this terrible feeling that almost everything I read was a waste of time, since it was just going in one ear and going straight out the other. When it came time for me to actually apply the information I read, I often wouldn’t remember it.
One way to fix this would be to take notes and review them later. An even better way to fix this would be to incrementally read everything (e.g. with supermemo). But right now I’m shooting for the 80/20 solution here, trying to make friction extremely minimal.
Here’s the stupidly basic solution readwise proposes: as you read, just highlight anything you want to remember, and review your highlights every day. If you’re reading on the app, this means you can just drag your finger over the text you want, and it’ll save the highlight to your library. If you’re listening with text-to-speech, just double-tap on your headphones and it’ll automatically highlight the current section you’re on. Then, every day you re-read around 10 highlights that you’ve previously saved (then there are a few more advanced features, like editing how frequently it’s shown, or turning the highlights into cloze deletion cards). You can also have NotebookLM automatically convert this daily highlight review into a little 5min podcast. This is what I listen to everyday while I walk from the bus stop to work.
As somewhat of an aside, I recently tweeted this:
“Why read a 200 page book when you can read a 2 page blogpost with the same info?” Most of the value of reading comes from chewing on an idea for hours + background processing on how it applies to your life. It’s easy to be introduced to ideas- the hard part is applying it, and books give an excuse to do so. There’s also a secret third option, which is to add it to a spaced repetition system and be prompted to reflect on it repeatedly. Unfortunately this might be missing some of the value of a book, which is that you’re introduced to a huge variety of applications / rephrasing / different contexts of the idea, which can help with applying it to your own life.
^ I have a feeling that a lot of the value of reading long-form content is that it stretches out the time in which you chew on the concepts. Sometimes there are gold nuggets of knowledge in short, 3min blog posts, but the issue is that this doesn’t give you the time to chew on it. You finish the whole post in 3 min, then close the tab and never think about it again. To really grok it, you’ve just gotta look at it 20 different times until you really internalize how it fits into your life. Technically, most of the ideas conveyed in a lot of books could probably be condensed into Substack posts, or even tweets, but there’s a real value of simply cranking up the text length to 300 pages just to force people to actually internalize the concept. I have a feeling that this could be somewhat shortcutted by revisiting the concepts with spaced repetition.
Engaging with content
I’m generally really worried that I spend way too much time passively absorbing content and way too little time actively engaging with it. A related goal that I have is to do “less, better thinking”. I don’t want to passively read content. I want to flesh out my disagreements (subtle or not), dig deeper on topics, notice confusion, and make changes to my life based on the stuff I read.
Here’s what actively engaging with content could look like:
- Walking through each paragraph and listing what I agree / disagree with
- Asking an LLM to role play as the author and I test my disagreements against it
- After reading something, summarize what I learned and list what I want to learn more about / follow up on / changes I should make to my life based on it
- Send it to a friend and ask what they think
- Remember my confusions and plan a few questions that I’ll ask my more knowledgeable friends on the subject
- Summarize it in my own words and re-think it with a different framing
- Figure out how it applies to the specific project I’m working on
A funny thing I’ve noticed is that I’ll be reading something and want to leave a little note, but the anoyance of just opening a notes app and writing down a little bullet point is enough for me not to do it. Readwise is a partial fix here since it makes it really easy to leave in-line notes (though this is notably lacking when using text-to-speech + headphones). This friction thing is also why I’m excited about using voice mode with LLMs to do the above things.
SO what are you actually gonna do?
Remember that quote about cosmic horror and constantly losing your memories? You’re experiencing it right now. By tomorrow, most of this post will be gone, unless you do something right now. So set a 5 min timer and pick one thing:
- Go download Readwise.
- Go download Anki.
- Write out a plan for how you’re gonna interact with the next article you read.
- Put a 30-minute block on your calendar for this upcoming weekend, and schedule-send an email reminder to yourself in two weeks, checking in on your memory systems.
This is your reminder that if you close the tab now without a concrete plan, this will fall into the vast graveyard of closed tabs, long forgotten :)
For some more reading recs, check out a list of memory-related articles I’ve saved on Readwise here. Also, feel free to email me at george.ingebretsen@gmail.com if you’d like to discuss your systems (or any of this stuff)!
P.S.: Thanks to Saul Munn and Raj Thimmiah for organizing memoria.day and introducing me to the world of memory systems. Thanks to the Memoria attendees for awesome conversations. Thanks to my coworkers Arunim and Adam for our awesome lunch conversations about this stuff.