What is Incremental Reading?
Incremental reading is a method of reading many texts in parallel, in small prioritized portions, while extracting key passages into a spaced repetition system for long-term retention. Conceived by SuperMemo creator Piotr Wozniak around 1999, it merges reading, highlighting, and review scheduling into one continuous process.
In incremental reading, imported articles are read in fragments; the reader extracts important passages, and extracts are progressively condensed into questions, typically cloze deletions, that enter a spaced repetition queue. The scheduler interleaves fresh reading with due reviews and postpones whatever matters less, so attention keeps flowing to the highest-priority material across a large collection.
Its claimed strengths follow from established principles: extraction is selective attention, condensing extracts into questions is generation, review scheduling is spaced retrieval practice, and jumping among many sources interleaves topics. The claims for the full pipeline, however, rest mainly on its designer's documentation rather than independent controlled studies, and the workflow has a famously steep learning curve.
Even without adopting SuperMemo, the pattern is portable. Reading in prioritized passes, keeping many sources in progress without guilt, and pushing your best highlights into a review system rather than an archive captures most of the design. The core insight is that reading and remembering should share one workflow instead of being separate activities.