https://praxis.fortelabs.co/progressive-summarization-vi-core-principles-of-knowledge-capture/
It might seem absurd that something as simple as a method of highlighting could be so important to a person’s productivity and learning. Even I’m surprised that’s turned out to be the case.
But as testimonials and stories have streamed in from people putting it to use around the world, I’ve become convinced that it is the beginning of a sea change in how we consume information. Just as mindless materialism has given way to mindful consumption, as we’ve realized that more is not always better, I believe we’re starting to see a parallel shift in our attitude toward information consumption. We’re learning that making is often more satisfying than consuming.
“Economic development is based not on the ability of a pocket of the economy to consume but on the ability of people to turn their dreams into reality”–Cesar Hidalgo, Why Information Grows
College students have said they will never take notes any other way (“You mean my class notes could be useful even after I graduate?!”). Elite consultants have used it to help their clients make sense of the massive amount of data they have at their disposal. I’ve been happily surprised to hear experienced content creators tell me that Progressive Summarization has reinvigorated their reading and writing.
Even if you decide not to adopt the summarization method as I’ve described it in this series, I want to outline what I believe to be the universal principles of knowledge capture in the digital age.
In no particular order:
Most organizing focuses on containers and categories, obsessing over wherethings should be stored. But the digital world is changing too fast to justify all this upfront work of questionable value. We need quick, lightweight methods of annotating and saving content in the stream of our daily work.
The best way to do this is to maximize the time spent interacting directly with the content itself. This deep engagement helps us learn at the same time as we organize, forcing us to make snap decisions about what to keep and what to ignore. This mirrors how our biological brains work: we don’t “look up” our memories by name or folder or tag; we reach directly for the content itself.
There is a parallel here to the early days of the world wide web. Yahoo created an empire by manually categorizing the pages they thought were important into an index, like a front page to the web. But Larry and Sergei took a very different approach with Google: their PageRank algorithm showed that the web did have a structure, but not one created by humans. The structure could emerge from the content itself, and the links between content. We can use the same technique by allowing our highlights to reveal the structure inherent in our notes, saving us the effort of creating it ourselves.