Level 2 notes on Tiago Forte's "progressive summarization" blog posts
by Michael V. Hannigan · 18 things on NewTwos
- Layer 2 compression of Tiago Forte's blog post: "Progressive Summarization: A Practical Technique for Designing Discoverable Notes" .... unhighlighted points are directly taken from the blog with no summarization.
- https://fortelabs.com/blog/progressive-summarization-a-practical-technique-for-designing-discoverable-notes/
- 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.
- But now we turn to a more fundamental question: how are these packets made? Once we capture something, how do we structure the note so that it’s easily discoverable and usable in the future? How do we make sure what we’re saving today adds value to future projects, even when we can’t predict or even imagine what those projects might be?
- That is the job of Progressive Summarization.
- I propose we make the design of individual notes the primary factor, instead of tags or notebooks. This has many advantages:
- With a 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.
- In the case of notes, I believe the two priorities we are trying to balance are discoverability and understanding.
- 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.
- 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.
- Here, writer describes 4 stages of progressively compressing material. At each stage the information gets further distilled.
- Part II: Examples and Metaphors. https://fortelabs.com/blog/progressive-summarization-ii-examples-and-metaphors/
- This blog entry mainly offers examples from Tago Forte's own notes about the 4-level distillation process.
- Here’s the crucial thing to understand: I don’t summarize notes on any sort of schedule, in any particular order, or as a part of a workflow. I summarize them completely opportunistically, when I’m already reviewing the note for some other purpose anyway.
- A given note may not be summarized until months or years after it’s been captured. Many notes may never be summarized. This is not just acceptable, it is absolutely fundamental to focusing your attention primarily on your most valuable notes. This is how your first brain works: use it or lose it. 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.