Clear your professional reading backlog with Readwise Reader

Professional reading piles up in email, browser tabs and downloads until it is easier to ignore than to read. A weekly session in one place fixes that. Readwise Reader collects articles, PDFs, newsletters and videos with transcripts, lets you highlight the essentials and resurfaces highlights later, and its AI assistant summarizes and answers questions about a document. A weekly session takes about 45 minutes and ends with actions, not just a cleared queue.

Collect in one place

Send the week's articles, newsletters and PDFs to Reader. Newsletters sent to the special address are forwarded automatically; check once in a while that work emails have not ended up among them. Keep confidential client PDFs out, since documents are stored in the service's cloud.

Triage by summary

For each item, read the summary and decide: read in full, skim, or postpone. Most items fall into the second and third groups, and that is fine. The summary is a triage tool: it tells you whether an article is about something you need this week. It is a poor substitute for reading when the content matters, since summaries of long PDFs skip tables and footnotes, which is often where the numbers are.

Highlight what changes your work

While reading, highlight numbers, conclusions and anything that changes how you work. Be selective. A highlight is a note to your future self that this matters; highlighting whole paragraphs defeats it. For numbers, highlight them in the document itself so you can find the source later.

Group the highlights

At the end of the session, group the highlights by topic. Reader's assistant can help, or you can export the highlights with source names into a chat assistant:

Role: you are an analyst preparing a weekly digest for a manager. Context: my role: {{role}}. Below are my highlights from the material I read, with source names. Task: group the highlights by topic, give a one-sentence conclusion for each topic and name the sources. Separately suggest three actions for my work with the reasoning. Format: topics with conclusions, then the actions. No long dashes. Highlights: {{highlights}}

Check that each conclusion follows from the highlights and not from the model's general knowledge.

Three actions

Write down three actions that follow from what you read: a process to change, a question to raise with your team, a rule to check against your own practice. Reading that produces no actions is entertainment, which is fine on the weekend and hard to justify on a work afternoon.

Share what is useful. If a highlight matters to a colleague, send them the passage with the source, not a retelling. A two-line message with a quote and a link is read; a forwarded article with "worth a look" usually is not.

Archive

Archive what you have read so the queue does not grow. Postponed items that stay postponed for three weeks can be archived too; if they mattered, they will come back in another form.

What to do

1. Collect the week's articles, newsletters and PDFs in Readwise Reader.
2. For each, read the summary and decide: read in full, skim or postpone.
3. While reading, highlight numbers, conclusions and anything that changes your work.
4. Group the highlights by topic with the assistant.
5. Write down three actions that follow from what you read.
6. Archive what you have read.

A good session

The week's queue is cleared, highlights are grouped by topic, and specific actions follow from what you read.

Pricing

There is no free plan; the Readwise subscription price is to be confirmed on the vendor's site. See Readwise Reader pricing, Readwise Reader alternatives and Readwise Reader vs NotebookLM if you mainly need answers from a fixed set of documents.