- Do you feel like you don’t find time to read books?
- Do you struggle to create the habit of reading?
- Do you think you’re missing opportunities to grow due to the lack of reading?
Like you, I was there suffering a lot because I love reading, but my daily life is pretty “active” (as yours), and I couldn’t find the right moment.
On top of that, I like to relax, recover, and spend time with my family on weekends.
Conclusion 1: no “time blocks” available for reading.
Conclusion 2: all the guilty feelings expressed in my questions above.
The Beauty of Problems
When you’re dealing with a problem that doesn’t let you live as you wish, you start dedicating time to thinking about a solution.
That’s the beauty of having problems: you need to solve them.
Why Is Reading So Important?
Having a solid why to take action is essential in life.
In my case, reading is a critical element because it affects ICOR®’s first stage: INPUT.
ICOR® is a 3-layer ecosystem we’ve designed and developed in the Paperless Movement®. It allows people to get work done with better information management.
INPUT consists in moving information from the outer world to “my world”.
That’s where everything begins because depending on the information you consume is how you’ll move forward to achieve your goals.
Getting “radical” to get the point: you’re nothing more than the output you get from the information you capture and process.
That’s why reading is so crucial.
The Solution
I found the solution thanks to one app that changed everything.
Later on, I improved, even more, the reading process thanks to 2 additional apps I’ve been using for years.
The First App: Deepstash
I don’t know if you’ve experienced this.
Often, I see this: a book is based on just one idea, and the author just talks about it from different perspectives that are mainly useless.
It’s just one idea that matters. The rest is fluff to say he wrote a book.
I’ve tried apps like Blinkist or Shortform. They’re both amazing services, but they don’t work for me.
Read, for example, Blinkist’s claim: “Powerful ideas — 15 minutes at a time”. Maybe it works for you. For me, it’s literally impossible.
The app I’ll introduce to you is a totally different approach. It’s called Deepstash.
Blinkist or Shortform offer you a summary of any book. It’s ok, but again, I insist: it takes you 10–15 minutes to read those summaries and, in my life, I cannot fit that time length.
Deepstash is different.
It focuses on what matters the most: ideas.
When reading a book, you’re just looking for ideas that resonate with you. Things that make you think. AHA moments that can improve your life on any level.
That’s what Deepstash offers you on a silver platter.
It’s not about summaries. It’s about simple and small ideas you can read in just 30 seconds or even less!
Depending on the time you have, you consume more or fewer ideas. As simple as that.
You can create stashes, kind of categories to store your ideas. For example: apps, productivity, relationships, business.
Whenever an idea resonates with you, you save it in a stash.
I don’t know you but, for quite a long time, I felt I didn’t take advantage of my reading.
I mean, I read books (tons of them), but I forgot about the content, all the ideas I never put into action.
That situation is something I overcame thanks to an awesome app I’ve used for years: Readwise.
The Second App: Readwise
Readwise allows you to store highlights and use space repetition to interiorize them.
You can connect Readwise to many other apps or services like Kindle, X, and so forth, so the highlights you save go to Readwise and, from there, you can start reviewing on a daily basis.
So, wouldn’t it be great to be able to move ideas from Deepstash’s stashes to Readwise?
That’s what I’ve achieved thanks to another app that, again, I’ve used for many years: Drafts.
The Third App: Drafts
Drafts is simply awesome thanks to an amazing combination: simplicity and powerful features.
I won’t go deep into Drafts because I’ve written quite a lot about it in the past, so I’ll just focus on what matters to connect Deepstash and Readwise.
You can easily copy an idea from Deepstash and paste it on Drafts. I’m talking about milliseconds.
Drafts allows you to create actions. They’re scripts you can find out there, install, and use.
There’s an action to add a draft (that’s how Drafts call its documents) to Readwise.
You just need to press a button.
The beauty of that action is it allows you to add that draft (Deepstash’s idea) to a “book”, a “book” you can create.
On Readwise, a book can literally refer to a book, but it can also be considered “a place to store similar things”.
I guess you get where I’m going.
That’s it: I’ve created a book on Readwise for each Deepstash stash.
The rule’s always the same: different apps, same structure.
How to Put Everything to Work Together
These are the easy steps you can implement right now to get back to your reading habit:
- Save the Deepstash idea in a stash.
- Copy the idea’s text.
- Paste it on Drafts.
- Execute Readwise’s action.
- Save the draft in a Readwise’s book which name is exactly the same one as your Deepstash’s stash.
An Additional App to Improve Your Worklow Even More
But, you can even go further.
I use Mem as my note-taking app to store all my “chaotic thinking”.
I just throw things on it because its artificial intelligence system helps me retrieve the information and create relationships I could have never thought of.
There’s an action on Drafts to move a draft to Mem, again, just pressing one button.
I do that too.
That way, I can take the best of Mem to get inspired on a daily basis whenever I do a search.
Takeaways
All the previous steps take me seconds, but look at all the things I’ve come up with:
- I’m reading again.
- I’m capturing ideas.
- I’m reviewing them constantly to put them into practice.
- They’re stored to be found at any moment.
I’m on a 130-day streak on Deepstash. The app tells me I’ve read 3.200 ideas and saved 879.
I can tell you it’s worth it to give it a try!
