Napkin Connects Your Readwise Highlights by Topic
Are you ready to unleash the full effect of your Readwise highlights? By automatically building associations between ideas, Napkin enhances your ability to make connections, spark inspiration, and put your ideas into action.
Apply here to have all your Readwise highlights connected for free.
With Napkin, you can playfully browse your highlights connected by topic, providing you with a fresh perspective and new insights every day.
We are Living Through a Second Gutenberg Moment
We read and hear more enticing ideas than ever. Our media consumption is exploding: Books, newsletters, social media, podcasts…
Today, there is a prevalent theme that we are consuming an excessive amount of information our brain is not yet prepared for, and we anticipate consuming even more in the future. This may lead to feeling overwhelmed and stressed out. How can you ensure your mental well-being in the midst of this? How can you act on good ideas before they are forgotten?
As a Readwise fan you probably love the Daily Review of highlights in spaced repetition. But do we really need to review them as if we were preparing for a vocabulary test?
Napkin tries a different approach and makes the retrieval of highlights seamless.
Using Napkin is like having access to the best ideas you ever came across at any given moment — no need to remember when or where you read something. Napkin clusters your ideas around topics independently of their source and time collected.
Imagine you are pondering a topic and you go to your bookshelf and all the books that contain relevant ideas magically start hovering in front of you — opened on precisely the right page, comfortable for you to read. In this case, it includes not only ideas from books but everything you collected on the web, while reading on your Kindle and listening to podcasts. Of course, the source is only a click away; Napkin then opens Kindle, your podcast player, or the website where you collected the idea.
In the first Gutenberg moment, scholars came up with mechanical approaches to handling more information. Half a century later, Napkin realizes this long-prevailing wish of curious minds and makes it effortless.
Your Mind is for Having Ideas, not Holding Them
One of the biggest challenges when reflecting and acting on new ideas is the limited scope of our memory. Our brains can only hold so much information simultaneously, and we often struggle to make non-obvious connections between ideas. But with Napkin, you can overcome these limitations and tap into the full potential of your ideas.
Unlike traditional note-taking tools, Napkin works like your mind. It builds associations between ideas automatically in the background — just like your brain does.
We designed Napkin based on cognitive psychology: Beauty leads to calm; simplicity to focus; and connections lead to deeper understanding.
Uncovering the relationships between ideas and displaying them in a dynamic interface gives you a subconscious perception of connections. This quickly puts you in focus mode, helping you discover new connections and gain fresh perspectives that inspire your imagination and practical application of these ideas.
Experience the Magic
After connecting Napkin with your Readwise account, Napkin pulls the latest 50 highlights from your Readwise library daily, analyzes them, and connects them with previously collected ideas.
You can remove tag suggestions that are not meaningful and add tags manually. Napkin learns how you think over time and adapts to your tagging behavior.
What do Readwise Fans Say about Napkin?
“When it comes to note-taking, I use two apps. I highlight ideas with Readwise and review them in Napkin. When it comes to reviewing ideas and getting inspired, nothing comes close to Napkin.” — Shu Omi
“It’s such a cool way to explore the highlights that you’ve thought were interesting months and years ago.” — Nicole van der Hoeven
“Napkin is one of those tools you start working with, and you might reason with yourself that you don’t need it, but then after some time, you find your mind tugging at you, pulling on you to return to Napkin’s unique and refreshing visual interface.” — Chris aka TfTHacker, Get inspired with Obsidian and Napkin
Napkin Makes Thinking Easy
Daily Inspiration
Every day Napkin creates a playlist just for you. The Daily Mix holds three to seven ideas. Some that you recently collected, some that match their topic, and some you haven’t seen in ages.
Many Napkin Thinkers made inspiration a daily habit by reflecting on their Daily Mix and related ideas.
Topic Deep Dives
Pondering a certain topic? Use the lightning-fast full-text search or start a playlist with all your ideas around a certain tag with a single click.
Putting Your Ideas in Writing
Sort your thoughts for your next big decision, memo or blog article per drag and drop.
Get Your Readwise Highlights Connected for Free
And the best part? You can try Napkin for seven days for free.
We are a young, independent company based in Switzerland, founded in 2022 by Fabian Wittel and David Felsmann. We are still in beta and improve Napkin every week. We are grateful to have supporters from over 65 countries whose feedback and paid subscriptions make the development of Napkin possible. Every dollar earned is reinvested in making Napkin better, thinking easier, and the world more inspired.
We are constantly experimenting. We want to know if Readwise users would prefer to see all their highlights connected at once instead of 50 highlights per day. If you are one of them, apply via the link below, and with a bit of luck you are one of the 10 pioneers per week who see all their Readwise highlights connected right from the start.
