1,000 Days of Book Highlights - What Did I Learn?
I just passed a surprising milestone. For 1000 days in a row, I’ve reviewed 5 random highlights from the books I’ve read. When I started, I was only trying to have better access to my highlights, but I discovered that the random review brought more value than I could have imagined.
Why did I start doing this
About 4 years ago I joined a book club with some of my coworkers. We picked a book renowned in our field — Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins. We reviewed this book together and had a lot of great discussions. I ended up reading ahead because the content was exciting and actionable. I wanted to see what I could learn and how I could start applying it to the situations at work I faced every day.
Throughout my reading and the book club discussions, the book was filled with Post-it flags marking the sections with ideas I wanted to try. That was the only way I knew to read a book like this — filling it up with flags to find those important ideas again.
When we finished Coaching Agile Teams, I put it on the shelf and moved on to other books full of great ideas. I would only pick it back up when I needed to reference a specific detail or technique I had read about. But something had to trigger me to think about the book to go back to my highlights.
Around this time, I started learning about the idea of Zettelkasten through the book How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens. I got excited about having a system to quickly find these highlights instead of them sitting on the bookshelf collecting dust.
Discovering my system
As I tried to put together a system in the note-taking app Obsidian, it wasn’t going quite as easily as I thought. I had all of these highlights in the form of Post-it flags and didn’t quite know how to best make use of them. Thinking about typing everything into Obsidian from these books felt impossible.
I learned about an app called Readwise and how it could grab all of your highlights from Kindle books. At that time I was reading both Kindle and physical books, so I knew I would have to switch to Kindle entirely for this to work.
My goal when I started was for Readwise to get the highlights from Kindle into Obsidian. I was still trying to get better access to the highlights. However, I learned that was not the feature that would bring me the greatest value.
What have I learned
Readwise has a feature called the Daily Review. This will select 5 random highlights from everything you have marked and present them to you in a nice visually appealing format. At first, I started going through it in the mornings because it was interesting and easy to do.
After doing this for a while, I realized the randomness of the highlights was a great addition to my daily life — both at work and home. The situations I face with the teams I work with change and new challenges regularly come up. These highlights seemed to start showing up at just the right moment to give me a new idea or remind me of something that could help with the situation. I discovered that this gave me new perspectives on what I was reading and I found new ways to apply the ideas I was encountering.
Highlights that showed up at just the right time
I have seen 5 highlights from the books I have read for 1,000 days so that means I have had 5,000 chances for the right quote to show up that I needed in that moment. 5,000 opportunities to be reminded of something I thought was important and wanted to remember. Here are just two of those moments.
The first comes from Time to Think by Nancy Kline.
At work, I moved into a management role and began conducting one-on-one meetings with everyone on my team. This will often result in having discussions about a tough situation someone is currently trying to figure out. They might be struggling with how to teach something to one of their teams or how to handle a scenario.
This highlight helped remind me that sometimes what they need is for me to listen and ask questions so they can find their answer rather than me handing my answer to them.
The second comes from Mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Penman.
Since the pandemic, many people have had their lives turned upside down and I am no exception to that.
This quote from Mindfulness showed up at a stressful time in my life. It helped remind me that I need to nourish myself with the things that recharge me, especially when times are tough.
My system today
Since I started using Readwise almost 3 years ago I have added other sources into this workflow. I now take in not just Kindle highlights, but also articles, web pages, email lists, and YouTube video highlights into my system. I started using the Reader app from Readwise to help capture these different sources.
With so many careers today in knowledge work, having a reference system for that knowledge is essential to success and growth. We have to be constantly learning so we can benefit from the world of new ideas around us.
I no longer have the problem of useful knowledge sitting on the bookshelf next to me waiting for me to pick it up. Now I benefit from the ideas popping back up in ways that help me every day.