Supercharge Your Learning: Convert Kindle Highlights into Instant Study Flashcards

Have you ever wondered how many books you’ve read from which you can’t recall anything anymore? Reading business books is an excellent method for skill enhancement, but if you read them once and never revisit their content, it’s nearly useless.

We forget 80% of what we read once

According to a study conducted by Ebbinghaus in 1885, commonly known as the “Forgetting Curve,” it was found that we tend to forget approximately 80% of what we read once. Learn more about the Forgetting Curve in the article Spaced Repetition: How to Make Your Readings Stick in Long-Term Memory.

In a nutshell, the key to truly remembering what we read lies in repeated recall of the information. Regarding books, this implies finding an efficient way to recall what we have read. While rereading books is one option, it may not be the most efficient approach.

Luckily, there are more efficient solutions. In this article, I will show you how you can import your Kindle highlights to the Web Highlights Chrome extension, which uses spaced repetition learning to remember what you have read truly.

The spaced repetition technique optimizes your learning by scheduling review sessions at strategic intervals, reinforcing your memory and preventing forgetfulness. By incorporating spaced repetition, Web Highlights transforms your flashcards into a powerful tool for long-term retention.

What is Web Highlights?

Before delving into the specifics, let’s take a brief moment to familiarize ourselves with the capabilities of the PDF & Web Highlighter Chrome extension.

This productivity tool offers a range of features, including the ability to highlight text on any webpage or PDF, create tags, and take notes. Furthermore, it streamlines the process of transforming your highlights into flashcards.

How can I import my Kindle Highlights?

Once you’ve installed the online text highlighter from the Chrome Web Store, you can highlight text on any website or PDF you visit.
Consequently, you have the option to visit your Kindle library and conveniently access all your highlights and notes from the books you’ve read.

From there, you can proceed with two options:

1. Highlight the most important parts of your highlights

If you don’t need all highlights of a book you can manually re-highlight your highlights & notes from your Kindle library.

Highlighting your annotations manually is a simple process. Once you have installed the PDF & Web Highlighter Chrome extension, you can immediately start highlighting text by selecting it and clicking on the highlighter popup. You can also choose to highlight by right-clicking or using a keyboard shortcut. All your highlights will be conveniently displayed in the sidebar for quick and easy reference.

2. Import all highlights & notes of your books

If you consider all the highlights and annotations in a book to be valuable, you can take advantage of the “Kindle Import Helper” feature offered by Web Highlights.
This approach is simple: with a click of the “Import Highlights & Notes to Web Highlights” button, all your highlights and notes will be seamlessly imported into the Web Highlights extension.

Web Highlights ensures that the highlight color you choose on your Kindle device automatically applies to your highlights within the extension.

Recall your Highlights To Remember Them

After importing your highlights into the online highlighter, we come to the intriguing part — spaced repetition learning.
Once you have imported or manually created some highlights, you will locate them in the extension’s sidebar. To access it, click on the extension icon in your browser’s toolbar.
In this sidebar, you will also discover the button to initiate a recall session.

Initiating a recall session will display a popup containing details about your daily learning progress. Additionally, you can view your daily streak if you successfully engage in learning for consecutive days.

To assist in reinforcing the habit of recalling your highlights and notes, you have the option to enable a daily reminder of your learning session, which will be shown in the bottom left corner.

After clicking “Learn 10 of 10 highlights” a learning session will be started and you have the option to provide feedback for each learning item by selecting either “I remember” or “I don’t remember”. If you can successfully remember an item, its confidence level increases, and the item will be rescheduled for the next recall cycle.

In the given example above, we managed to successfully recall our highlight for the first time, leading to a boost in our confidence regarding our ability to retain it. Consequently, the highlight will be scheduled for review again in 3 days.

If, after the three-day interval, you can still recall the essential details, the review date will be set further in the future, perhaps at ten days. Subsequently, the review cycle may extend to approximately 30 days, and so on.

However, if you cannot recall a particular item, your certainty will decrease, and the review cycle will reset. In such cases, the item will be reviewed again on the following day.

If you wish, you can also choose to "Dismiss" any learning items. This will ensure that they will not be displayed during your sessions anymore.

Final Thoughts

Engaging in book reading is a highly effective method for personal growth and self-improvement. Nonetheless, reading a book just once proves to be inefficient, since we tend to forget approximately 80% of its content.

To address this, you can make use of the PDF & Web Highlighter Chrome extension, which not only allows you to import your Kindle highlights but also facilitates the retrieval of these highlights later on. This ensures that the important information is retained in your long-term memory.

Install the extension for free, and start highlighting on any webpage or PDF, create tags, and take notes. Share your research and export it to HTML, Markdown, and PDF.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article. I am always happy to answer questions and am open to criticism. Get in touch with me via LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter.