Our notes are things to use, not just things to collect.
It’s difficult to imagine ever forgetting the new idea.
notetaking is like time travel-you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.
Imagine your future self as a demanding customer
Each note is like a product you are creating for the benefit of that future customer. If they don’t buy it—they don’t think it’s worth the effort of revisiting past notes-then all the value of the work you’re doing now will be lost.
Paradoxically, the more notes they collect, the less discoverable they become! Thus, they miss out on most of the benefits of their knowledge compounding over time.
What do you do when communicating with a very busy, very What do you impatient, very important person? You distill your message down to the key points and action steps.
The technique is simple: you highlight the main points of a note, and then highlight the main points of those highlights, and so on, distilling the essence of a note in several “layers.” Each of these layers uses a different kind of formatting so you can easily tell them apart.
Here is a snapshot of the four layers of Progressive Summarization:”
Captured Notes
Bolded passages
Highlighted Passages
Executive Summary
By limiting what I keep to only the best, most important, most relevant parts, I’m making all the subsequent steps of organizing, distilling, and expressing much easier. If I ever need to know the full details, I have the link to the original article right there at the bottom.
Taking notes during meetings is a common practice, but it’s often not clear what we should do with those notes. They are often messy, with the action items buried among random comments. I often use Progressive Summarization to summarize my notes after phone calls to make sure I’m extracting every bit of value from them
Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible-it is a method for forgetting as much as possible.
Over-highlighting pitfalls:
A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10-20 percent of the previous layer.
Highlight with a purpose when you are getting ready to create something. Else,
you’ll quickly be mired in hours of meticulous highlighting with no clear purpose in mind. You can’t afford such a giant investment of time without knowing whether it will pay off.
wait until you know how you’ll put the note to use.
For example, when I’m preparing to write a blog post or article, I’ll usually start by highlighting the most interesting points from a group of notes that I think will be relevant to the topic at hand. That way I have a predictable, not-too-difficult task to get me warmed up for writing, the same way an athlete might have a warm-up and stretching routine.
When I’m about to get on a call with my lawyer, I’ll often prepare by highlighting my notes from our last call and drawing out decision points and action items into an agenda. He always thinks I’m well prepared, when in fact I just want to finish the call quickly to minimize the time I’m being billed for!
You have to always assume that, until proven otherwise, any given note won’t necessarily ever be useful. You have no idea what your future self will need, want, or be working on. This assumption forces you to be conservative in the time you spend summarizing notes, doing so only when it’s virtually guaranteed that it will be worth it.
The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future self* by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary. This is the “campsite rule” applied to information-leave it better than you This principle is called stigmergy-to leave “marks” on the environment that make future efforts easier.
Keep you future self in mind:
If you can’t locate a piece of information quickly, in a format that’s convenient and ready to be put to use, then you might as well not have it at all. Our most scarce resource is time, which means we need to prioritize our ability to quickly rediscover the ideas that we already have in our Second Brain.
When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done
Start by saving only the best excerpts from that piece of content in a new note, either using copy-paste or a capture tool. This is layer one, the initial excerpts you save in your Second Brain. Next, read through the excerpts, bolding the main points and most important takeaways. Don’t make it an analytical decision-listen for a feeling of resonance and let that be your guide for what to bold. These bolded passages are layer two.
Now read through only the bolded passages, and highlight (or if your notes app doesn’t have a highlighting feature, underline) the best of the best passages. The key here is to be very picky: the entire note may have only a few highlighted sentences, or even just one.
Not only is that fine, it represents a highly distilled and discoverable note. These highlights are layer three, which is distilled enough for most use cases.
