Last week we organized using the PARA framework. Why PARA? Because this framework helps us move along the spectrum of actionability. Moving along the spectrum means preparing information for the right context like a chef prepares ingredients for the right recipe.
This week we’re learning how to prepare through information capture and progressive summarization. Brief summaries follow.
Information Capture
What is information capture?
It’s a method of curating references like e-books, articles, images, podcasts and videos.
What to capture?
Capture what's interesting. Capture what's relevant. Cast a wide net, but only pull the parts that are essential. You don’t need to capture an entire book, only the main points.
Why capture?
Your brain can’t remember everything. Capturing builds a reference network that drives learning. As you capture, each note builds up a latticework of theories and mental models that allow you to access the information you need in the moment you need it.
How to capture?
Use whatever tools help you take action efficiently. I’m using a mix of capture tools like Readwise, Instapaper and Liner so I don’t disrupt consuming and thinking in the moment, as Tiago suggests.
Where to capture?
In a centralized place where you can retrieve and use them as needed. PARA-organized. This is your second brain.
Progressive Summarization
This is a method of reducing, compressing, and summarizing a reference into the essential. It’s about moving layer by layer from the specific to the gist. In practice it looks like this:
layer 0: the original source
layer 1: selecting and capturing the interesting, relevant, essential parts
layer 2: bolding
layer 3: highlighting
layer 4: summarizing
layer 5: remixing
See an example in my Evernote.
The Adjacent Space
Capturing and progressive summarization enable you to play with ideas in a sandbox, see how they fit together and see what shapes emerge.
“To play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specification.” - How to Take Smart Notes, Sönke Ahrens
The ability to play with ideas, abstract and then re-specify is what leads to innovative breakthroughs as Cal Newport points out in So Good They Can’t Ignore You.
“We take the ideas…and we jigger them together into some new shape…the next big ideas are right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas.”
The goal is better notes that let you play with ideas, not more notes that don’t.
Mapping the Capture System
The value of PARA is to help me feel supported and responsible for my learning not forced into an artificial structure. Along with capture and progressive summarization, it helps me extract value out of my second brain.
In practice, I’m applying these methods so that my second brain is good enough to move forward and not a distraction.
To illustrate, this is what my map of information flow looks like.
It’s messy and imperfect, but it works for now so that I can extract some value.
Task Switching is the Barrier
My current frustration is that only 5% of the existing notes in my system are progressively summarized—enabled for play.
This increases time spent scanning across 100’s of notes to discover what’s relevant, decreasing my motivation to write. At times this decreased motivation has led me to think that I’m being lazy or need to power through.
But in Laziness Does Not Exist, Devon Price, a social psychologist and professor at Loyola University Chicago, argues that laziness is not real—it’s a “misdiagnosis”—and that we need to identify “unseen barriers.”
Writing, and then switching tasks to locate, reduce and summarize so that the content of your notes are usable, creates a barrier in the process, and takes you out of the flow. Using the metaphor I employed last week, it’s the equivalent of heating the pan, and then leaving to buy butter so you can make an omelet. It makes you not want to cook at all.
Numerous studies have pointed out that task switching results in a “direct decrement in behavioral performance.” And as Sönke points to another study:
A good workflow can easily turn into a virtuous circle, where the positive experience motivates us to take on the next task with ease, which helps us to get better at what we are doing, which in return makes it more likely for us to enjoy the work, and so on. But if we feel constantly stuck in our work, we will become demotivated and much more likely to procrastinate, leaving us with fewer positive or even bad experiences like missed deadlines. We might end up in a vicious circle of failure (cf. Fishbach, Eyal and Finkelstein, 2010).
Jump In and Start Before Overthinking
I came across the graphic novel, Year of Zines, by artist Sarah Mirk and captured the introduction in this note. It’s a note of inspiration for my Areas of sketching but also for Building A Second Brain. And it relates (agrees with) another note I captured from Ultralearning:
Sometimes the best action is just to dive straight into the hardest environment, since even if the feedback is very negative initially, it can reduce your fears of getting started on a project and allow you to adjust later if it proves too harsh to be helpful.
It would be easy to get intimidated and overwhelmed by the fact that only 5% of my notes are summarized. I could get stuck summarizing everything in Evernote until I get to 100%. But that runs counter to my aim:
Catalogue my learning and shape shaped by projects.
As I said before, it needs to be good enough to move forward and not a distraction. Moving forward, I’ll apply capture and progressive summarization methods to existing notes as they become relevant to my projects and areas.
Progressively-Summarized Takeaways from the past 3 posts:
Learning is teaching is living
Catalogue your learning until a project emerges to shape your learning
Get it right just enough to keep moving
Don't capture everything, but...
Make what you capture easy to understand and re-contextualize so that your future self can play in the adjacent spaces
This is so good! It accurately summarizes what was taught to us and you summarized it in a way that still captures your personality. I can see a bit of level 5 remixing in this piece, I'm floored! It's also very pleasing to read. Waiting for the next one!