I just read this Superorganizers interview with Robert Cottrell who writes a newsletter called The Browser. The headline, of course, caught my eye: this guy reads 1,000 articles a day!
At the end of the interview, Cottrell talks about using an app called Bear, which is billed a beautiful note-taking app. This, naturally, grabs my attention. A beautiful note-taking app? Who wouldn’t want that?
I then get sucked into a rabbithole of comparing Bear and Notion and Roam. Finally, I decide to pull the trigger on a Bear Pro subscription. After all, it’s tax deductible business software, right?
As I was reading the article I had already saved it as a task in Things to mark the Cottrell article up and distill his reading technique for future reference.
Now I had a new tool to try this distillation process with. So I fired up Bear and took some quick notes. And now I’m going to try publish those notes here because I haven’t posted anything in a while! (Holiday is over…)
So here are my takeaways from the Superorganizers interview with Robert Cottrell.
How he reads
- Start with the headline
- Check the lede
- Cut your losses if the lede doesn’t work (which is similar to Freeman-Shor’s advice in ‘The Art of Execution’)
- Main heuristic is surprise
Writer portability
- Readers will follow writers, not publications. eg. you’ll want to read Susan Orlean in the New Yorker or the Financial times.