An influencial concept with significant impact and reassurance for my own note-taking system
What is difficult is not transferring content from place to place, but transferring it through time. You know what I mean: you read a book, investing hours of mental labor in understanding the ideas it presents. You finish the book with a feeling of triumph that you’ve gained a valuable body of knowledge
<aside> 💡 This has to be my essential focus in note taking. I have to be able to revisit my notes. That means using the #spaced repetition systems I have made in Notion - and, unfortunately, paying for ‣.
</aside>
I want to suggest an alternative to all the approaches above: what you read is good and useful and very important, you’re just reading it at the wrong time.
You may try to apply the science-based methods the book recommends, only to realize it’s not quite as clear-cut as you thought. You may try to change the way you eat, exercise, communicate, or work, trusting in the power of habits. But then the everyday demands of life come rushing back, and you forget what motivated you in the first place. At this point, people take different paths. Some give up, labeling all “self-help” books a waste of time. Others decide it’s just a problem of remembering everything they read, and invest in fancy memorization techniques. And many people become “infovores,” force-feeding themselves endless books, articles, and courses, in the hope that something will stick.
is taking bids for a huge new contract. The challenge of knowledge is not acquiring it. In our digital world, you can acquire almost any knowledge at almost any time. The challenge is knowing which knowledge is worth acquiring. And then building a system to forward bits of it through time, to the future situation or problem or challenge where it is most applicable, and most needed.
<aside> 💡 This is the heart of what I am trying to do with #Pocket (app and 'read-it-later' service), ‣ and Notion. I want to make my ideas - which mostly come through my Pocket reading - useful to myself in the future. That means they all need to be in the same place, here in Notion.
</aside>
At that future point, when you’re applying that knowledge directly to a real-world challenge, you won’t have to worry about memorizing it, integrating it, or even fully understanding it. You will only have to apply it, and any gaps in your understanding will very quickly reveal themselves. By the time you’re done solving a real problem with it, book knowledge has become experiential knowledge. And experiential knowledge is something you carry with you forever.
<aside> 💡 I should expect there to be gaps in my thinking. This is why my #Weekly review sessions are important - to give me time not only to assemble, but to tend and grow my notes.
</aside>
Making a note discoverable involves making it small, simple, and easy to digest. We accomplish this using compression: creating highly condensed summaries, without all the fluff. But we also want to make our notes understandable. This involves including all the context: the details, the examples, and cited sources to be sure nothing falls through the cracks.
<aside> 💡 This is what Notion , Pocket and Readwise enable me to do. It's expensive, but I need to value what it produces. It's just part of the cost of getting my thoughts into order.
</aside>
Progressive Summarization focuses therefore on rebalancing the equation. It is a method for opportunistic compression — summarizing and condensing a piece of information in small spurts, spread across time, in the course of other work, and only doing as much or as little as the information deserves.
<aside> 💡 When I visit these notes and ideas in the future, I should be prepared to adapt them - to keep them live as I go along. I shouldn't just leave everything until the weekly review, or the weekly review will end up taking hours.
</aside>
compression is a means to improving discoverability. So our design challenge when creating a note is: “How do I make what I’m consuming right now easily discoverable for my future self?”
<aside> 💡 This is an essential question. I need to develop a plan of how to write my notes in a way that I am writing tpo the audience of my futureself as well as providing myself with a Templates to structure thinking to get my thoughts in order.
</aside>
Layer 2 is the first round of true summarization, in which I bold only the best parts of the passages I’ve imported. Again, I have no explicit criteria. I look for keywords, key phrases, and key sentences that I feel represent the core or essence of the idea being discussed.