Progressive Summarization: A Practical Technique for Designing Discoverable Notes | Praxis

The challenge of knowledge is not acquiring it... The challenge is knowing which knowledge is worth acquiring. And then building a system to forward bits of it through time, to the future ... challenge where it is most ... needed...when you’re applying that knowledge directly to a real-world challenge, you won’t have to worry about memorizing it...

apply it, and any gaps in your understanding will very quickly reveal themselves... book knowledge has become experiential knowledge... something you carry with you forever. 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...

a universal system for organizing any kind of digital information...P.A.R.A. — Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives... how these “packets of knowledge” are organized: in discrete notes, sorted into 4 categories according to actionability, and resurfaced using RandomNote...

how are these packets made?...Progressive Summarization... make the design of individual notes the primary factor... individual atoms ... ready to be assembled into elements, molecules, and compounds that are far more powerful...

the two priorities we are trying to balance are discoverability and understanding... Progressive Summarization... is a method for opportunistic compression — summarizing and condensing ... in small spurts, spread across time... only doing as much or as little as the information deserves...

“layers” of summarization. Layer 0 is the original, full-length source text... Layer 1 is the content that I initially bring into my note-taking program... Layer 2 ... I bold only the best parts... at a later time, when I’m already reviewing... using the attention I’m already spending ... to “buy” the information I need ... and summarize for future use...

Layer 3, I switch to highlighting... the “best of the best,”...

Layer 4 ... I summarize layers 2 and 3 in an informal executive summary ... restating the key points in my own words... for a tiny minority of sources, the ones ... I want to become part of how I think and work immediately, I remix them... a blog post interpreting, critiquing, or extending the argument