You probably read 20-30 articles a week. HackerNews, Twitter/X threads, newsletters, Substack, Medium, tech blogs, that long-form piece your coworker sent you on Slack. Maybe a thousand articles a year.
Quick test: name three specific insights from articles you read last month. Not topics — specific insights. Arguments. Ideas you could defend if challenged. Most people can't name one.
This isn't because the articles were bad or because you weren't paying attention. It's because reading alone, without active engagement, has terrible retention. The research is clear and depressing: you forget 50-60% of what you read within 24 hours, 80% within a week. Your reading habit is a library where most of the books are on fire.
The fix isn't to read more. It's to add one small step after each article that converts passive reading into active retention. That step takes 2-3 minutes and saves you from the "did I read this?" déjà vu that plagues online reading.
This tutorial shows you the workflow. It's the smallest, simplest Ritsu workflow — designed to be habitual, not heroic. You'll do it after every good article, forever.
Prerequisites
- A free Ritsu account.
- An article you just read (or are about to read). Any URL. HackerNews link, Substack post, blog, Twitter thread (yes — paste the URL and Ritsu extracts), or a PDF.
- Two minutes. Seriously. If the workflow takes longer than two minutes you'll stop doing it, and that defeats the whole point.
What you'll build
- A quick quiz on the article's core ideas (~5 questions).
- Flashcards on the 2-3 insights worth remembering long-term.
- A small archive of insights that grows over time into something genuinely useful for your work.
Most people who start this habit can't go back — they look at their pre-habit reading and feel like it was wasted motion. The point isn't to read less; it's to make reading stick.
Steps
1. Paste the URL
Open Ritsu. Start a session called "Reading notes — [YYYY]" (one per year is fine; this is a fire-and-forget habit, not a precious project). If you already have one, use it — you want all your reading notes to accumulate in one searchable place.
Paste the URL:
[URL to the article]Ritsu fetches the article, extracts the main content (stripping ads, navigation, author sidebars — just the substance), and is ready.
If it's a paywalled article you read in your browser with a subscription: most paywalled articles have an archive.today or 12ft.io mirror you can paste instead. For Twitter threads: the URL of the first tweet works — Ritsu pulls the whole chain.
2. Ask for the insight summary (30 seconds)
Type:
/explain this article in three bullets — what's the main claim, what's the strongest evidence, and what's the one insight most people would miss on a casual read.That last one is where the real value is. Every article has obvious surface content (the headline, the thesis) and a layer of nuance that most readers blow past. Ritsu surfaces the nuance.
Read the three bullets. This is your 30-second "did I actually understand what I read" check. Often you'll spot that you missed the strongest point or the actual argument. That's not a failure of the article — it's a failure of how fast you read online. Ritsu gives you a second chance.
3. Quiz yourself (60 seconds)
Type:
/quiz — 5 quick questions on this article, mixed with 1-2 "so what" application questionsRitsu builds the quiz. Take it. Answer in your head or by typing — either works.
The "so what" questions are the important ones. "What's the main point?" is recall. "If this claim is true, what does it change about how you do X?" is application. Application questions force you to connect the article to your actual life, which is the only way a passing insight becomes a durable one.
Expect to get 1-2 questions wrong even on articles you thought you understood well. That's normal and useful. It calibrates your confidence against your actual retention.
4. Keep 2-3 flashcards, skip the rest (30 seconds)
Not everything is worth remembering. Most articles have one good idea and a bunch of padding. Type:
/flashcard — 2-3 cards on the genuinely memorable insights from this article. Skip the obvious stuff.Ritsu generates cards. Accept them and they go into your spaced-repetition queue. Reject any that don't feel worth keeping — there's no penalty for being selective. If the article only had one great idea, keep one card.
These cards will surface again: tomorrow, in three days, in two weeks. By the third repetition, the insight is lodged. You now have knowledge from that article, not just "I read something about that once."
5. (Optional) Connect it to prior reading
This is the step that makes long-term readers powerful. Type:
/connect — have I read anything else in this session that relates to this article's claim? Agrees? Disagrees?If you've been using this workflow for a few weeks, Ritsu will surface connections: "Three weeks ago you read an article that made the opposite argument. Here's how they frame the disagreement."
This cross-article synthesis is how reading becomes thinking. You're not just consuming opinions — you're building a mental graph of how ideas relate. Over months this accumulates into something that looks suspiciously like expertise.
Troubleshooting
"The article is a 50-tweet thread that Ritsu can't fully extract." Paste the URL of the first tweet. If Ritsu only gets part of it, screenshot the missing tweets and drop them in — Ritsu reads screenshots. Threads are just prose with weird line breaks.
"The article is paywalled and I don't have a subscription." You shouldn't be reading it, legally. If you have the article via other legitimate means (your library, archive.org for old articles, a colleague's shared doc), paste the extracted text directly.
"I read 30 articles today, can I batch them?" Yes. Paste URLs back-to-back at the end of the day and run the workflow sequentially. But honestly — if you read 30 articles today you probably didn't actually engage with most of them. Better to be choosier about what you read and actually retain.
"I can't tell which articles are worth the flashcard effort." Heuristic: if after two days you'd be sad to have forgotten the article, it deserves a flashcard. If it felt forgettable at the time, skip it. Most articles don't deserve flashcards — that's fine. The habit works as long as you're catching the good ones.
"This feels like overkill for a blog post." It's 2 minutes. For every article you genuinely care about, 2 minutes is trivial. The alternative is reading 1000 articles a year and having nothing to show for it — which, let's be honest, is exactly what happens without a system.
"I'm worried my quiz answers are just me remembering what I just read, not 'actually knowing.'" That's why spaced repetition matters. The quiz right after reading is short-term retention. The flashcards surfacing days later are long-term retention. The workflow uses both.
Why this works (the 90-second explanation)
Reading is passive input. Quizzing is active output. The gap between what you think you know (after input) and what you can produce (during output) is where all learning actually happens. Without output, reading decays.
The workflow doesn't add reading time — it adds a two-minute retention catalyst to reading you were doing anyway. ROI: knowledge per hour of reading goes up 5-10x. Cost: minor disruption to your reading habit, quickly forgotten once you've done it five times.
Every serious knowledge worker I know has some version of this — Readwise is one, Anki another, a commonplace book the analog version. Ritsu just bundles all three into a chat and handles the scheduling for you.
Try it yourself
Right now, scroll up in your recent tabs. Find the article you read ten minutes ago. You know the one. Paste its URL into Ritsu and run the workflow.
Two minutes from now you'll have a quiz, flashcards, and — more importantly — proof that you do in fact remember more when you engage actively. That small proof is what turns the workflow into a habit.
Paste your URL below. Ritsu handles everything else.
