Readwise: Keeping your mind curious and remembering what you learn

Retirement gives us something we spent most of our working lives wishing for: time. Time to read, study history, finally understand investing, or explore photography, gardening, genealogy, or whatever captures our curiosity.

There is only one problem. You can spend an afternoon reading something fascinating and, a few weeks later, remember very little of it.

You don't have to be retired to know that feeling. For people with ADHD, it can be even more familiar: you read an interesting article, jump to another subject, save three more things for later and then wonder, "Where did I read that?"

That is where an application called Readwise becomes interesting.

An External Memory

Readwise collects the passages you highlight in books and articles and brings some of them back to you later through a Daily Review.

Suppose you highlight a passage about George Washington while reading about the American Revolution. Normally, you'd finish the book and never see it again. Readwise can bring it back days or weeks later. You aren't rereading a book; you're revisiting an idea. Readwise says its review system uses spaced repetition and active recall so highlights don't simply disappear into a digital library.

Human beings forget things, and some changes in recall and attention are a normal part of aging. But the National Institute on Aging notes that older adults remain quite capable of learning new skills and forming new memories. Readwise simply gives that learning somewhere to live.

Not Brain Training, but a Healthy Habit

I'd be careful about calling Readwise a "brain-training" app. There's no evidence it prevents Alzheimer's or dementia. The National Institute on Aging reports that cognitively demanding activities may benefit older adults, while noting researchers are still studying their long-term effects.

What Readwise does encourage is staying curious: read, highlight, revisit, ask another question, connect it to something else. That's very different from endlessly scrolling through disconnected bits of information.

Its companion app, Reader, gives you one place for articles, newsletters, PDFs, e-books and videos, with highlights syncing automatically to Readwise. Imagine sections for history, travel, gardening, local history or biographies. Instead of the internet deciding what deserves your attention, you build your own reading room.

A Useful Tool for ADHD

For many people with ADHD, the problem isn't a lack of curiosity. It's too many interesting things competing at once. An article on World War II leads to Churchill, then British elections, and 20 minutes later you're reading about how Big Ben works.

CHADD recommends using external systems like notes, reminders and calendars to reduce how much you have to hold in your head. Readwise does the same for ideas. Save it, highlight it, search for it later. You no longer have to keep telling yourself, "Don't forget this."

Reader also reduces some friction. It offers text-to-speech, a Focus Mode that highlights the paragraph you're reading, and an AI assistant called Ghostreader that can define a term or explain a difficult passage without sending you down another browser-tab rabbit hole.

Five Minutes a Day

Don't turn this into a complicated technology project. Read something you enjoy, highlight two or three things that make you stop and think, and spend about five minutes each morning on your Daily Review. No elaborate tagging system required.

Keep Learning

We often talk about retirement in financial terms. But there's another question worth asking: What am I going to keep learning?

A career provides constant mental stimulation, and retirement removes much of that structure. CHADD has noted that for some older adults with ADHD, losing work routines can make attention challenges more noticeable. That's one more reason to build habits that keep us reading and exploring.

Readwise won't make anyone smarter, and it isn't a medical treatment. It simply gives curiosity a place to go.

Keep reading. Keep asking questions. And every once in a while, let technology remind you of something worth remembering.

Deryck Burnett is the founder of Megabite, a technology, creative and multimedia company on Amelia Island. Reach the team at 904-430-0350 or Megabite.