How to Get What You Want From Highlighting

• Nov 3rd, 2026
• by Sascha

You highlighted your reading material and created extensive marginalia. Now what?

The most common answer is to manage the material. The purest form of management is to completely automate the transfer from wherever these highlights are to some kind of repository. The Kindle to Readwise-pipeline is the most common one.

But what do you gain by moving highlights from one place to another? The hope is that by structuring the new repository, the highlights become accessible. To a degree, this is correct. If you put the highlights in a container you can access via full-text search, you can find a highlight if you remember the highlighted words.

However, what is missing is the entrainment of the impulse giver of the search: you. By creating a repository of highlights, you don’t ensure that you’ll search it later for what you actually need. Let me show you, by a real example, the problem:

When my daughter was 8 months old, she started playing with the electrical outlets on the wall. So, naturally, I wanted to tell her to stop. But how can you do it at such a young age? I then had an idea because I once taught the meaning of “no” to another non-lingual being: my dog. I learned a simple communication rule from a dog trainer who works with service dogs. Many people make the mistake of repeating “no” to get the point across. However, this makes the dog less likely to obey. Why? In the dog world, communication follows simple traffic-light logic. Green means do whatever; yellow is a warning; red is the correction. They do nothing to communicate green, growl or stare for yellow, and snap or bite for red. The dog needs to learn that “no” is a warning, a yellow light. But if you repeatedly say “no”, the dog will learn that a “no” will lead to another “no”. If you then correct your dog, the correction will come from nowhere. You will not only teach the dog to ignore your “no”, but the dog also might feel treated unfairly. Instead, you should warn the dog with one “no”. If the dog doesn’t stop, correct it immediately.

But the framework is not obedience or being extra strict. It is clarity of communication. The dog will respect your command not because it is more submissive, and it will not respect you because you are stricter. It will respect your command because it now understands it, and it will respect you because you are a better leader.

This worked wonders with my daughter. When she started to play with the outlet, I said “no” once. When she didn’t listen, I just picked her up. After very few repetitions, my daughter started to respect my no. Not because she all of a sudden respected my authority as a father, but merely because of the clarity of information. I put her up for learning success.

In my Zettelkasten, I have a note on this idea for clarity of communication in the context of training your dog. Obviously, I linked this note to the one about teaching a small toddler to understand and respect the meaning of no. But this raised a serious issue: The goal of dog training is basically to reduce independent decision-making because almost all decisions that dogs make are stupid, like hunting a rabbit in the park, eating poop or litter, charging at other dogs, etc.¹ The goal of child-raising is to make your child an independent decision-maker. If I apply methods of dog training to child-raising, do I run into the problem of hurting the future independence of my children?

The question is now: why could I have these two ideas?

1. An application of a method of dog training to teaching my daughter.
2. A possible issue resulting from the above application.

I give you a couple of conditions that I met:

• I thought about dog training for a long time. My dog was very difficult to train (my neighbor said that putting her down is the only option). That meant that I did a lot of thinking and problem-solving about behavior modification. So I pre-trained my inclination to think about the issue with my daughter from a behavioral modification perspective.
• I processed the traffic-light framework thoroughly. Clarity, authority, relationship, bonding — I worked through a lot of different perspectives on that idea. The clarity-authority connection particularly interested me. This set the stage in my mind to think about the issue as a clarity problem and later connect it to independence.
• I treat my Zettelkasten as a mindscape for thinking. That means that I am used to looking for connections and working with an open mind (which means allowing for divergent thinking). Entering my Zettelkasten puts my mind into the right mode for having ideas.

As you see, ideas don’t fall from the sky. You put yourself in a position so you can actually capture them. It is a game of luck, and it is legal to fix the dice in your favor. In fact, the whole game is about fixing dice.

If you highlight without writing, you never stop to think about it. This results in bad recall. The problem with the commonly held concept of recall is its close association with being tested: whether we can recall an idea when prompted in a test situation. But when you need to solve a problem, you might fail to apply what you already know because the problem doesn’t prompt you to recall the idea. So, to make a new connection and create new knowledge, you have to recall the ideas you learned in the first place. By processing the idea, you create multiple prompts to recall the idea. It is spaced repetition but with self-created and diverse prompts instead of the same prompt over and over again.

The hack, the trick, the magic is to process what you highlight. If you highlighted something, you read it. That means that you consumed it. If you never process the highlight, you never digest what you consumed.

To digest the highlight, you have to think about it. To think well, you have to write. So, what is a highlight? A highlight is a writing prompt.

This is how you decide whether to think about a highlight:

1. Reread the highlight.
2. Is this highlight worth a deeper inquiry?
   • Will you benefit in the short-term?
     1. Will a deeper understanding benefit one of your projects?
     2. Will a deeper understanding benefit one of your areas of responsibility?
3. If yes, process the highlight.

Coming back to how you make the captured idea your own:

1. Write the idea down in your own words. (Hint: there is a longer section in the Zettelkasten Method book on how to make an idea your own.)
2. Edit the draft you created because editing the note is thinking about the idea.
3. Check whether you got the idea right.
   • Can you present the idea to another person and the person will get it?
   • Can you make the idea an atomic note?

What’s the verdict then? A highlight is a thinking prompt. A thinking prompt is a writing prompt. If you have to write anyway, you can exploit this activity to build a Zettelkasten. So do your writing in your Zettelkasten and make it your mindscape.

A highlight in a repository is lost to the void. An idea you make your own has taken root.