Thoughts About Connect
About six years ago I more or less completely traded in Spotify for Overcast while driving, hiking, grocery shopping, and really any other occasion where I was doing something that I could actively listen in the background.
The problem. I was consuming a wealth of information, but retaining hardly any of it.
This continued until I came across this magic set up: Airr + Readwise + Roam.
3 tools that, when combined, create a workflow for retaining audio gold.
Airr = podcast player
Readwise = the connector
Roam = my note taking app of choice
So where as before I was retaining virtually nothing, now I retain exactly what I want.
The workflow goes like this...
The first bit is made possible by a feature that Airr calls Airrquotes. At any point while listening, I can double tap my left airpod or hit the previous track button on the steering wheel, and Airr will clip the last 45 seconds as a marker. So listen listen listen, clip clip clip.
Then, once every few days, I'll pull up the Airrquotes tab on the app and review my latest Airrquotes. Here, you can edit the duration of the clip and add notes or context to the clip. AKA - try to give my future self the reason I clipped this bit. For a lot of podcasts, the transcriptions are already available which is super handy, and you can request one podcast transcript a day. This is useful because the transcript text makes it through to Roam as well, ie, searchable in my notes app.
Once a week, I'll manually sync Airr to Readwise. (This is because if on auto, the edited quotes don't seem to update just right.
I have Readwise connected to Roam and set to automatically sync.
And voila! My podcast clips/notes are in my note taking app.
I have Readwise attach an #inbox tag to them, so once a week I go through the inbox of all the imported notes from various sources and make sure the right tags and context are applied.
Ultimately you could add more or skip some of the steps I have laid out, but I've found that this spaced repetition at the Airrquote tab and then again in the Roam inbox helps enhance retention.
Your future self will thank you. Happy Podcast Listening!
Some addition points:
- The Airr player is early days. It's not up to the same quality as a lot of the other players. But if you implement the system to retain podcast knowledge, I've found it worthwhile.
- You don't have to us Roam. I like it, but you can also sync to Evernote or Notion.
- Readwise is also great for capturing tweets, kindle books, and Instapaper/Pocket to a note taking app as well.
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