Progressive Summarization A Practical Technique for Designing Discoverable Notes (Forte, 2017)

Metadata

• Author: Tiago Forte
• Full Title: Progressive Summarization A Practical Technique for Designing Discoverable Notes
• Category: #articles
• Document Tags: pkm
• Summary: Progressive Summarisation is a method for organizing notes to make them easily discoverable and useful in the future. This approach focuses on designing notes that balance simplicity and context, allowing for quick understanding without losing important details. By structuring notes thoughtfully, you can create a valuable resource that supports your learning and problem-solving over time. Titrating summarisation effort based on resonance and potential for future use helps you focus on the most valuable notes rather than applying the same summarization effort to all. The idea of progressive summarisation can be applied to various media, helping individuals distill complex information into accessible insights.

Highlights

• 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. (View Highlight)
• I propose we make the design of individual notes the primary factor, instead of tags or notebooks. This has many advantages: • It works well with any other organizational system, without depending on them (including but not limited to tags and notebooks, if you want to use those) • It makes all work you do on your notes value-added, because you’re spending close to 100% of the time engaging directly with the content itself • It can more easily survive migrations to other devices, storage locations, and even programs, because note content is much more likely to be preserved than overarching structure • It cultivates skills (succinct communication, finding the core of an idea, visual thinking, etc.) that are inherently valuable and highly transferrable to other activities • It makes your notes more legible and useful to others (unlike your internal notebook structure, which is only for your use), promoting collaboration and sharing 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. (View Highlight)
  • Note: The author suggests 'note-first' organisation as an alternative to either a tag-based or container-based (folder, notebook) means or organising the corpus
• 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. (View Highlight)
  • Note: The author identifies a balance between detail (leading to a comprehensive discussion and deeper understanding) v summary (making the note discoverable because easier to grasp quickly)
• 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. (View Highlight)
  • Note: The author advocates that summarisation should only happen opportunistically, when the reader needs to access the note for other reasons, e.g. to review, for inclusion in other work. The author's approach is also designed around keeping all the levels of summarisation within the same note through a progression of:
    • selection of source material for the note
    • using bold text to highlight keyblocks
    • using highlighting to further summarise
    • only then writing a summary at the top of the note
    • the final level, only reached by some notes, is the incorporation into new, original aggregate notes There are 4 guidelines:
  1. Don’t apply all layers to all notes
  2. Use resonance as your criteria
  3. Design a system for the laziest version of yourself
  4. Keep your notes glanceable (View Highlight)
• There are 4 guidelines:
  1. Don’t apply all layers to all notes
  2. Use resonance as your criteria
  3. Design a system for the laziest version of yourself
  4. Keep your notes glanceable (View Highlight)
• 1. Don’t apply all layers to all notes (View Highlight)
• There is no “preferred” level of summarization. More summarization is not better. Instead, you want to calibrate the amount of attention you’re paying to any given note, to correspond with how valuable that note is. (View Highlight)
  • Note: Author gives an example from his own use: ~50% of consumed sources get "clipped" into a note ~50% of those (25% of total sources) get emboldened layer 2 ~80% of those (20% of total sources) get highlighted layer 3 ~25% of those (5% of original sources) get an exec summary < 20% of those (<1% of original sources) get remixed into new aggregates
• 2. Use resonance as your criteria (View Highlight)
• Resonance is a diffuse form of attention, a sort of emotional-intuitive perception that can scan for multiple kinds of patterns at once: • what is surprising or counter-intuitive • what we know to be true, but we never quite thought of it that way • what aligns with and helps us interpret past experience • what is inspiring, moving, or meaningful • what helps us simplify and interpret other, more complex ideas • what tickles us in some inexplicable way, often becoming clear only much later • what speaks to our deepest goals, values, priorities, and questions • what breaks or challenges mental models, conscious or unconscious • what is rare and interesting, and could potentially be useful in the future (View Highlight)
• 3. Design a system for the laziest version of yourself (View Highlight)
• You’re designing a system for the worst version of yourself, as Alan Cooper says in his book on interaction design, About Face:

  Design an interaction model for the worst version of yourself — the one that’s tired, lazy, unmotivated, frazzled — because that’s the one that usually shows up when you need a solid workflow to fall back on. (View Highlight)

• You have to limit yourself, most of the time, to only what you’re willing to do for every single note, consistently and far into the future. (View Highlight)
• 4. Keep your notes glanceable (View Highlight)
• Recognition over recall (View Highlight)
• This is the true purpose of Progressive Summarization: not to exhaustively catalogue every idea like bugs in a collection, but to create an environment of rich triggers, prompts, and hooks to spark memories, connections, and even more new ideas. (View Highlight)
• • the principle of compression is not at all limited to text. It is a universal feature of all information, and by extension, all media. (View Highlight)
• Examples A collection of examples from Forte's own notes, from a wide variety of different kinds of media. They should illustrate that any kind of media can be progressively summarized: • Mindgym Performance Mgmt notes (white paper) • Psychological Capital paper notes (academic paper PDF) • Google Uses Structured Interviews to Improve the Hiring Process and Retention Rates (online article) • Critical Chain PM podcast (podcast) • Toyota Kata notes (book) • Premature Synchronization is the Root of All Evil (tweetstorm) • Baumol’s cost disease (Wikipedia article) • Notes on Demistifying the MOOC (NYT) (New York Times article) • Habit Mapping (paper notebook) • DOES San Francisco 2016 w/ John Willis notes (YouTube video) • Good Strategy, Bad Strategy notes (audiobook) • Giles Bowkett: Why Scrum Should Basically Just Die In A Fire (blog post) • Kirkpatrick’s Four-Level Training Evaluation Model — MindTools.com (output from Liner app) • Stratechery: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter, Facebook Messenger and Payments, Facebook Instant Articles Fizzing? (email) (View Highlight)