My Reading And Information Workflow with Instapaper Readwise And Roam Research

i'm adam with productivity academy and this video is going to be sharing a little bit about how i'm using several of these tools for my uh basically my reading and storing workflow or my personal knowledge management workflow at least as far as it applies to things like online articles and getting that stuff highlights notes all of that having that somewhere useful and then acting on that uh so basically it is a reading workflow and adding value to that at each step and and you know it's about dealing with problem that we all face now on a daily basis right just a huge amount of information that we're coming across and then how do we keep what we want how do we add it to our existing information wherever that may be whether it's in our head whether it's in a evernote or notion or a database somewhere or a scrapbook and then how do we make it more useful over time um you know as far as you know finding this useful if you're interested in making more use out of what you come across and also dealing with what you come across on a daily basis you're going to find this useful uh you know i don't think that you have to say you're a knowledge worker or you know you do one specific thing i i think that you know if you deal with digital information and you want to have a better way of dealing with it that adds value for yourself and others over time this is for you so also shout out to my friend jesse uh who asked for this and we were talking about some stuff related to this and i said you know here's the tools i'm using and i'm just like man that'd be cool you know how do you use this i said well i should probably actually make a video because it's kind of confusing if you haven't used these tools to just say well here's the tools i use and i kind of connect them and then it just works because right there's always more behind that so i really made this video uh for jesse and wanted to share this with you everyone else who might uh wonder about the connecting these tools or just behind the scenes how it works so uh let's just dive into it i'm going to show you how i do this okay we're going to start off with instapaper and i'll explain why in a minute but first of all you know to get the full usefulness of this workflow you're generally going to have to pay for at least some of these tools okay they're all ha or they all have at least some sort of a free component that so you can test them out or a trial but to really get the full use of this you're definitely going to have to pay i think for example with instapaper i think you only get something like five highlights per month right which isn't going to cut it if you want to make this useful and you know this is up to you to decide how useful having a workflow like this is for me having the ability to quickly grab articles of interest mark them up save them for later you know move the highlights and notes to an area where i can incorporate them into bigger ideas is hugely valuable so paying something like 20 or 25 bucks a month is definitely worth it but that's personal and that's up to you to decide you know which tools are worth it and maybe which aren't so let's talk about instant paper okay this has been around for a long time and it's dead simple to use i generally almost exclusively use this on mobile but am recording the desktop and from time to time i use it desktop as well so it comes with a handy little chrome extension so i you can just click on this when you're on an article and save it and then with the mobile apps when you can just use your sharing button or wherever that may be for you and whatever system you're using and when you have the instapaper app installed it just pops up and you can do that and it just shares you get a success notification you go right back to what you're doing so this allows you to really quickly deal with articles which is nice because you don't have to read them right then and there which is really really important okay so just use it you highlight what you want again on mobile it's great i'm not going to record a video on holding my screen down or holding my finger down on the screen and swiping to highlight words but that's what you want to do is right you're highlighting the really important parts of the articles you're going through you can add notes to those highlights if you want and anything that you highlight or note will be sent to read-wise once it's connected okay which is the second step in this flow so assuming you want to get your highlight somewhere else you're going to want to check out read wise and have that connected which we'll be talking about next all right so well i mentioned this just a minute ago but really you know insta paper this functions is your first pass so you don't have to worry about having too much stuff here right and it's good if you don't get to everything i've got some stuff in here i haven't looked at you know stuff where i started to make notes and that's okay so feel free to archive too stuff that has been there for a long time you can always look at your archives or do a quick search through here but you know to me it's a sign that hey it piqued my interest but it wasn't really something i needed because clearly if it was i would have gotten to it and but maybe it will be in the future so i can just archive it i don't have to delete it right i can come back to it and then as time allows you to just whip out instant paper on your phone go through an article you can highlight you can add some notes and this is great right you can do this from time to time instead of playing a game or checking your email constantly so i actually do this a lot of times in the morning while i'm having coffee and i do find that doing this consistently is good because if you do want to get your highlight somewhere you've got to make the highlights first so you know maybe getting started with this workflow you need to set up yourself for a little reminder just to go in here but i think with anyone who's looking to set up a workflow like this that's probably not going to be too important okay so not going to spend too much time on instapaper check it out if you haven't already so read wise okay this is the kind for me the newer one i've only been using it for about a month and i signed up i believe for a year just a couple weeks ago this has been really really helpful so as you've been highlighting things if you connected it to read wise you're going to start seeing these highlights pop up for review and read wise all right this is uh great that's what it was made for so let's actually go over here and check this out so again this is an app that generally i'm using on mobile but for ease of use we'll just do this here all right so i've already done my five of five and you can adjust this so this is just saying out of all the highlights i have already across all the articles all the books that i said i want to have five and done a day all right but let's do more let's see what's going on here um okay so we've got a book radical candor right it's a book on leadership management let's see okay this looks pretty good just a quick review and what i do here um is you know i'm just looking to see one this is spaced repetition right because it's grabbing uh some interesting uh information from the highlights but i can also say that sometimes the stuff i highlight actually it doesn't make sense for me to review it so i will discard it and there's sometimes entire articles or books that are purely referenced for me that i can then go into the settings and set the review period to zero or never and that's also important but just uh to be uh clear here you can do several things you can favorite them you can keep the highlight and you can discard the highlight and just a note that has nothing to do with what's going to be passed on to rome or evernote or notion this is just purely in read-wise okay but just wanted to show you a little bit about this i think that this is a obviously a great tool it's what it was made for and they've got more in that but i just again want to focus on on the workflow and for me it's about getting it into rome where i can do more with it so i briefly mentioned uh let's actually go back here i briefly mentioned that you of course have your highlights imported in here and it could be from articles it can also come in from kindle this is some really cool features right you can browse and add popular highlights so books that either you haven't read or maybe you've read the the physical book and you could get the highlights that's like the most highlighted things that other people have done um and there's a lot more to read-wise i could not do it justice in this again just want to focus on kind of the workflow here but you can also export to rome which is what i'm focusing on but you could do this to notion or evernote depending uh on what you want to do there so what is interesting so this uh getting the highlights from read wise right because now read wise is kind of filled with your highlights and it connects automatically so i believe read wise developed it but rome just recently has released an api so maybe changing a little bit but you can customize the header which i'll show you that goes onto the page in rome and i've done some minor changes and i know some other people have done some similar things so let's check that out okay so we come over here and all i did was click on rome export uh in the main menu and you can do a manual export but this is what i wanted to talk about they've got the variables metadata and then this is what is getting put in the highlights header so header text above each of the synced highlights all right so um and actually this one right here is what is going to be put into rom so let me expand that a little bit so these are some things i've added this i believe was what it came with and you'll get to see exactly what this looks like but that's nice because i'm going to add some tags and i also want to know what the status is all right so let's keep moving along now we just went through some of this i highly encourage you to check out read wise they've been great there's so much more again i can't get into it here because it would take too long and i don't consider myself you know an expert on every single uh bit of this their support has been fantastic again just check it out see if that makes sense to you there's so much this tool can do i this has been a great find so let's move on now to rome okay so here we are this is for anyone who's used rome this is pretty familiar this is the daily notes for anyone who hasn't used rome this is what just the blank page looks and it's actually if you pull open your sidebar here and you click on daily notes this is where it starts you could add notes here and i'm not again this is can't go into details on this but want to show you the basics so i've arranged this and i'll discuss where i uh how i arrange this and why and the people i got the ideas from but basically i go to my inbox of unsorted articles because that's where i can see everything that's been imported by read wise okay and there's different ways to do this but i'm just going to focus again on the way i do it and show what's happening here so i go to inbox and you can see you could click there and start writing stuff but you can see these linked references if you expand these down you can come in and take a look at you know all sorts of different stuff let's take a look at this one four steps to prepare for quantum computing so it's from security boulevard and then highlights all right this is just what read wise is adding on to there and so we've got this is the information that we were talking about that the header that it puts in there and so there's no tags but it is on each of them i told it to add inbox so that i can go to my inbox and see all of these so let's hop back over here right that is exactly what i told it to do all right so this is great so now i can come in here and as time or my interest allows i go through them to add bolding to the stuff that sticks out that's really the first pass all right there wasn't too much from this one um you know but they just said okay let's see this thread is imminent available to larger when quantum computers become available it's a larger public cyber criminals are likely hoarding okay that's actually of interest to me so i'm just going to for example bold that and we can see that and then we can also add direct links in rome okay i don't believe i have a ton of articles on this but i could probably i bet quantum computing is one so let's see so i can replace that that is a bi-directional link in rome okay there's different ways to do this again i'm not going to focus on like a rom tutorial but when we click on that we will go to quantum computing okay so it looks like just two articles linked no actual content there yet now this is uh the just the very first pass and very initial uh way to go through this so thanks to of course thiago forte for this if you're interested in you know the steps of okay what should i do the first time i review an article things like bolding highlighting when should i create a summary when should i turn it into something else definitely look at his information on progressive summarization all right there's some great information available now once i've done this you know in this case it's a very short example but i'll go back and update the tags right because i want to actually get a good idea because sometimes it's been a day or two or three maybe longer since i've done this or read the article so i want to get a good sense of what it is first and i can add any tags that come to mind in this case i've already got quantum computing in there but you know let's say i hadn't put that direct link in i could put that in there again and maybe this also let's see if security if i could spell correctly right just adding the tags that make the most sense okay it's up to you to decide i know there's all sorts of schools of thoughts on this on how tags should work should you use tags how many tags not gonna go into that i find it useful to add a few for myself now what i change here is i always change this once i've done this to pass one okay and if we go over to my sidebar i've added inbox pass one past two pass three and archives to my shortcuts and the way you do that is just by clicking on the star over here okay now once i've done that if i go back to my inbox all right it's decreased by one it used to say 55 and it's no longer in this list all right it's moved over to pass one because that's where i told it uh basically that's where i put that tag right so um what i've been doing real quick with these the way i got that idea was andy henson i saw i believe a great uh article it was which i'll include in the uh notes below uh but this is a great way to organize this and i like keeping a little bit of track how many times i've gone over something and then just to say that you know it doesn't have to go from inbox to pass one to pass two to pass three for archives or two archives for me sometimes uh you know i just move it to the archive if it's just truly archival level information that i found interesting or i thought would be useful in the future but just don't have the direct need for now i just don't need it sitting around and if i already know it's going to be a long time i'll just go ahead and do that over there again i find that not overthinking things with uh with this workflow works out better than trying to have these like really iron rules having just a couple rules in place and being flexible on it and just understanding the kind of general flow makes this much much easier to deal with all right so let's go back in here let's say i came back through here and for whatever reason this has become super important i could add some highlighting to this right so this would be the idea of like progressive summarization where we're coming in and you know you could come back and say okay wow that is pretty important i i've come across this twice and thought it was important and you know now it's past two and you know things you could do after that of course would be you know rewriting your own notes could be turning into something else maybe i'm going to incorporate this information as part of an article on quantum security that i'm never going to put together right i just personally find this interesting and want to have it available for quick reference and with rome the idea being here that you know you can use a lot of these you can copy uh this block and add it elsewhere right now that i've got things tagged i could come in here and do a quick query for things that have to do with quantum computing or security start pulling this up maybe if i was putting an article together if i was just trying to form my own informed opinion on the subject right i could do some quick research of my own material find what i've come across what notes do i have on it and very quickly instead of having to try to keep all this stuff in my head so the other thing i will talk about briefly with rome is using a text expander so i know that a lot of people know what these are and you might have heard of text plays a great tool uh so far and this is really easy it works great with chrome there of course there's different tools use whatever you like but for things like this let's say you know maybe you don't want to use some of these tools but you do want to add notes from books or articles you can do things like this where i have a command and obviously it can't clash with the commands in rome but i have one that of course won't work on screen there we go um where it does this i put the title there i have keywords author source i don't need this so much now but i developed some of these at the beginning or you know created them in textblaze so that i could quickly do this here as well as other places if i wanted to store them somewhere so of course there are you know just an infinite number of ways you could use textblaze to create snippets or outlines or templates and it's a great way to save just a ton of time so of course this has applications outside of room but this may be something again if you don't want to use this full workflow that you find interesting so um also i think that there are some great help docs available for both uh or rather rome uh for read wise and insta paper but you know my advice is just to try it out and don't think too hard about it do what you want and then solve the problems when they come up not before and if you do come up with some issues you know of course you can reach different support teams but also check out youtube okay i mean you might be watching this there but also there's especially with rome uh there's some great series out there on the details and really going into depth on you know what is a block reference how does this stuff work you know learning the details to really make it customize and work for you some amazing series out there so hopefully you found this helpful as far as a workflow using instapaper read wise and rome and if you have any advice any comments any questions by all means uh please leave them as a comment get in touch with me and uh again hats off and thanks to everyone that i've learned from thiago forte uh andy henson's uh article on his workflow as well as so many others

Channel: Productivity Academy

Views: 2,709

Rating: 4.6721311 out of 5

Keywords: productivity, productive, efficiency, productivity academy, adam moody, time management, organization, project management, roam research, personal knowledge management, productivity apps, reading workflow, pkm workflow, instapaper, readwise, information workflow

Id: CFAOfuja2Do

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020