One of my favourite publications is Every, co-founded by one of my favourite writers Dan Shipper. The quality of content Every is publishing is top-notch. While I do not feel attracted to every (no pun intended) single piece Every puts out, the Superorganizers publication has been a gold mine to get insights into how smart people organize what they learn. One recent piece published by Superorganizers and Dan Shipper is a deep dive into Simon Eskildsen's, Shopify's ex director of production engineering, workflows which turned himself into a learning machine by treating his minds like technology infrastructure. Additionally, the post is a lovely summary of Simon Eskildsen’s workflows in apps like Readwise, Anki, Things, but also his custom-made Zettelkasten system, and you will learn how he selects and reads books.

Simon Eskildsen's story on how he landed at Shopify is amazing: he was 18 years old, had a high school degree, and heard about a company called Shopify while reading through a Rails community. Shortly after he graduated, he did an interview with them. Simon Eskildsen flew to Ottawa, Canada, interviewed with them again, and decided to spend a gap year working at Shopify. Things went well leading to him staying at Shopify where he has now been working for six years. He was thrust into management and he is now leading a team of people who are 10 or 20 years older than him. Because Simon Eskildsen became a manager early in his career, he felt the obligation to be the best lead he could for the team. It was a big responsibility. He decided that the best way to meet this responsibility was to wake up earlier and read something every day before he started work.

It is fascinating to read through Simon Eskildsen's story, his workflows, how he leverages the tools he is using, and how he makes sense of what he is reading. I adore reading pieces about people's workflows, giving me the feeling they nailed down a system that works for them, a system that they can profit from.

The core of Simon Eskildsen's system is highlighting. He mostly reads on his Kindle, highlights things he finds interesting and syncs them to Readwise* (using that link will give you an extra free month to the 30-day free trial). Once you set up the integration between Kindle and Readwise, all your highlights will get scraped and Readies puts them into one place where you can search, tag, and review them. Recently, I also got back into using Readwise, since I wanted to streamline the process of digitizing the highlights of my physical books, so I can then incorporate them in my note-taking system. Readwise supports capturing highlights by taking photos of your physical book pages, you can then select the portion of text you would like to highlight, add the highlight to your account, and once you get back in front of your computer, you can access all the highlights with ease.

Thanks to Readwise, Anki, a custom Zettelkasten based on markdown files, and Things, Simon Eskildsen not only created the perfect learning system for him, but he also turned himself into a learning machine. I am not spoiling on the insights into his workflows, since I encourage you to take 13 minutes of your time to enjoy reading through How to Make Yourself Into a Learning Machine by Dan Shipper and Simon Eskildsen.