Stashing > Reading > Writing > Doing

Reader is a fairly new app from the folks at Readwise that helps users review information from books, articles, rss feeds, tweets, and other sources taken from the web. It’s a great tool for anyone who wants to revisit the valuable insights and ideas they’ve picked up from what they’ve already read. And, like similar bookmarking tools, yet another way to stockpile things you’d like to read in the future.

Of course, an even better way of learning something is to write about it, speak about it, and (hopefully) apply it. Which is why having a blog (or a vlog, or a podcast) can be especially helpful, because it forces you to reflect on what you’ve read and heard and seen, and create something that’s uniquely memorable for you.

That’s why I’ve been using Reader not as a read-it-later-tool, but as a research tool.

Not necessarily to stash books and articles I want to read later—I’ve rely on Instapaper and Raindrop for that—but to create a repository of information about a specific topic to analyze and examine now.

From there, I can apply tags to highlights, uncover gems and find patterns, and more generally extract the best information possible about whatever it is I’m researching.

Then I can write a guide about it, or blog about it, or mention it to a friend, and (hopefully) start to apply the lessons I’ve learned in my own life.

That might sound like too much effort to spend on learning something new. Until you realize that stashing something if only to read it, forget it, and review it again some time later is a difficult way to learn much of anything.