Learnalist

Learnalist for readers and knowledge workers

Keep useful ideas available after you close the book or meeting.

Books, articles, research, and work produce more notes than memory. Learnalist helps you choose the ideas worth keeping and bring them back later as small recall prompts.

Create a reading or work list Download the iPhone app

See what a useful reading prompt looks like

Choose an example, try to recall the useful point, then reveal what you wanted to keep.

  1. Ideas from books
    Prompt
    Why does Elizabeth Bennet come to dislike Mr Darcy?
    Recall
    She considers him proud and believes Wickham's account of him.
    Sooner Remind Later
    Use the reading templates
  2. Quotations worth returning to
    Prompt
    What does Oscar Wilde say some people do while in the gutter?
    Recall
    They look at the stars.
    Sooner Remind Later
    Use the reading templates
  3. Research and work notes
    Prompt
    What material did Hermann Ebbinghaus use in his memory experiments?
    Recall
    Lists of nonsense syllables.
    Sooner Remind Later
    Build a study prompt

Collecting notes is not the same as retaining them

Highlights and meeting documents are easy to store and hard to retrieve from memory. A short prompt asks you to reconstruct the useful point before looking at the answer.

Books and articles

Retain the arguments, quotations, mental models, and examples you expect to use again.

Research and professional concepts

Keep findings, terminology, frameworks, and technical distinctions available for later work.

Meetings and procedures

Review decisions, responsibilities, processes, and details that matter beyond the meeting itself.

A small reading-and-work workflow

  1. Step 1Choose one idea, definition, decision, quotation, or example worth retaining.
  2. Step 2Write a prompt that makes you recall the point without the source open.
  3. Step 3Review it later and decide whether it should return sooner or later.

Why Learnalist fits selective knowledge retention

Learnalist is deliberately smaller than a full knowledge-management system. It focuses on the ideas you want to recall, not on storing every document, building a second brain, or replacing your notes archive.

It is not a document repository or team wiki. Keep source documents and comprehensive notes in the tools designed for them; use Learnalist for the small subset worth practising.

Use the reading templates

See saveable examples for turning books, articles, quotations, and ideas into review-friendly prompts.

Saveable examplesReading templatesTurn books, articles, quotations, and ideas into prompts you can review. Browse everythingLearning methodsExplore practical approaches for remembering and reviewing what you learn.
Build prompts with AI

Frequently asked questions

How do I remember what I read?

Select a few useful ideas, turn them into questions, and practise retrieving the answers instead of only rereading highlights.

Can I use work notes?

Yes. Professional concepts, research findings, procedures, and decisions work when they can be expressed as short prompts.

Should every note become a prompt?

No. Save only material you expect to use again; otherwise review can become another inbox to maintain.

Choose one idea worth remembering

Create a reading or work list How spaced repetition works Explore other use cases