What’s your favourite ideas app?

For me it’s Readwise.

I’m constantly encountering ideas in books, articles, social media posts, blogs, etc. that I want to remember but know I never will. I’ve learned that the hard way. Ever try to remember your favourite literary quote to tell someone and it turns into a bumbling paraphrase? That’s me. To quote a famous poem, “I grow old, I grow mold.” (TS Eliot, by the way.)

Readwise is my preferred app to help me remember all these nuggets and store them. Simply connect the service of your choice (Kobo, Kindle, Instapaper and so on), and it will collect your highlights and notes into an easily searchable archive.

Readwise doesn’t just serve as a storage app, though. It also works to help you remember those ideas. The app has a daily review feature that surfaces entries for you using the idea of spaced repetition — the more you review the entries, the more you’ll retain the ideas. You can customize the number of entries, break them down by tags to show you specific categories, remove the ones you don’t want to see and more.

The app also makes it very easy to share these ideas. Hit the share button and it will generate an image of the quote and book cover that is ready for social media.

Readwise has become one of the few apps I use on a daily basis and my go-to app for storing the interesting bits of information I encounter. It’s not free but I find it’s worth the cost of subscription. And you get their new Reader app thrown in as well.

The only thing I found Readwise couldn’t help me with was capturing elements from physical books. However, that changed with a recent update that introduced a scan option. Now you can scan a passage from a print work and add it to your Readwise library. It even lets you search the title of the work so you can add the cover image to the quote.

At this point, Readwise is pretty much a perfect app and an absolutely necessary reading companion.