Konubinix' opinionated web of thoughts

Progressive Summarization

Fleeting

What is difficult is not transferring content from place to place, but transferring it through time

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

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

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

what you read is good and useful and very important, you’re just reading it at the wrong time

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

You’re reading about time management techniques now, but they will only be useful two years from now, when you become a manager and have much greater demands on your time.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

This is the job of a “second brain” — an external, integrated digital repository for the things you learn and the resources from which they come. It is a storage and retrieval system, packaging bits of knowledge into discrete packets that can be forwarded to various points in time to be reviewed, utilized, or deleted.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

discrete notes, sorted into 4 categories according to actionability, and resurfaced using RandomNote.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

Tagging-first approaches argue that there should be no explicit hierarchy of notes, notebooks, and stacks. Notes are envisioned as an ever-changing, virtual matrix of interconnected, free-floating ideas. Because many tags can be applied to one note, there are multiple pathways to discover any given note. Locating notes in specific notebooks and folders is seen as limiting and static

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

notebook-first. This basically translates how we organize things in the physical world — in a series of discrete containers — into the digital world

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

notebooks and folders actually suppress the serendipity and randomness that is at the heart of a creative lifestyle.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

note-first approach.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

note-first approach, your notes become like individual atoms — each with its own unique properties, but ready to be assembled into elements, molecules, and compounds that are far more powerful.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

balance priorities. You want one thing, but it has to be balanced against something else that you also want.

You want a vehicle to protect its occupants, but you can’t just add layers and layers of titanium armor plating. You have to balance safety against weight and cost

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

In the case of notes, I believe the two priorities we are trying to balance are discoverability and understanding

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

cannot summarize an article without discarding most of its points

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

making decisions about what to keep, you are inevitably making decisions about what to throw away

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

There’s a natural tension between the two, compression and context.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

communicate anything, you have to compress it, like communicating a huge amount of life experience in a wise saying. But in doing so, you lose a lot of the context that made that wisdom valuable in the first place

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

Jira. It has lots of context, making it highly understandable. But it’s not discoverable at all. It would probably take me a couple hours and tremendous mental effort to read through this note and remember enough context to decide whether or not it’s useful. The main points and key insights are hidden somewhere in the noise

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

Future You will likely be looking for a solution to a problem, not casual reading, they will be making snap decisions on a tight timeline.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

How do I make what I’m consuming right now easily discoverable for my future self?”

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

Progressive Summarization works in “layers” of summarization. Layer 0 is the original, full-length source text.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

Layer 1 is the content that I initially bring into my note-taking program

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

Layer 2 is the first round of true summarization, in which I bold only the best parts of the passages I’ve imported.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

Layer 3, I switch to highlighting, so I can make out the smaller number of highlighted passages among all the bolded ones.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

Layer 4, I’m still summarizing, but going beyond highlighting the words of others, to recording my own

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

restating the key points in my own words.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/

With Progressive Summarization, we are summarizing our notes, and then summarizing that summary, then summarizing that summary, distilling the ideas into smaller and smaller layers each time. With these layers exposed, we can do a flyby in the “airplane of discoverability,” quickly scanning the peaks, to decide if this mountain has anything to do with what we’re looking for. <img class=“progressiveMedia-image js-progressiveMedia-image aligncenter” src="" data-src="" data-recalc-dims=“1”/> But we’ve also preserved all the layers in context, so if we see a peak that looks promising, we can dive right in with our “parachute of understanding,” drilling down as deep as we need to:

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-ii-examples-and-metaphors/

Not only is it okay if I don’t remember the vast majority of what I read, that actually becomes my goal. I

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-ii-examples-and-metaphors/

I want my mind to be an empty vessel, a staging ground where ideas briefly stop in their journey from the outside world, to my second brain.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-ii-examples-and-metaphors/

to be fully present, and to also reach my intellectual potential

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-ii-examples-and-metaphors/

You have to be comfortable not only letting things fall through the cracks, but placing the cracks strategically so notes that don’t end up being useful automatically recede from your attention

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-ii-examples-and-metaphors/

You pull time-consuming, but risk-free activities (reading, highlighting, summarizing) as early in time as possible, and push quick but risky activities (execution, decision making, delivery) as far into the future as possible. This way, you have all the ammunition you need ready and waiting at a moment’s notice, while waiting until the eve of battle to decide which target to attack.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/progressive-summarization-ii-examples-and-metaphors/

Notes pointant ici