Progressive Summarization III: Guidelines and Principles

In Part I, I explained Progressive Summarization, a method for easily creating highly discoverable notes. In Part II, I gave you many examples and metaphors of the method in action.

In Part III, I will give you further guidelines on how to make Progressive Summarization (PS) a part of your daily work. They have been gathered from several years of using the technique in my own projects, and teaching it in my workshops and courses.

There are 4 guidelines:

Don’t apply all layers to all notes
Use resonance as your criteria
Design a system for the laziest version of yourself
Keep your notes glanceable

1. DON’T APPLY ALL LAYERS TO ALL NOTES

This is perhaps the biggest mistake I see as people adopt P.S. I think it has something to do with the type of person who finds productivity, organization, and research attractive in the first place. They tend to be meticulous, detail-oriented, and perfectionistic. They like perfectly enclosed, universal systems that leave no room for interpretation.

You’re going to have to let go of that.

PS is universal in that it can be applied to any kind of media (we’re still focusing on text but I’ll soon explore others). But it is NOT universal in how it’s applied. It is absolutely NOT the goal to stuff every single note through all the layers of summarization. This isn’t a funnel, where the more notes reach the bottom of the funnel, the better:

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.

Take the most common case — a note that is average in its insight and usefulness. This is the kind of note you will most often be dealing with, statistically speaking. You want to capture the best parts of the source as Layer 1, put it in the appropriate notebook based on its actionability according to P.A.R.A., and then you want to leave it alone. It may be months or years before you see this note again. That is not only perfectly fine, it is your goal: to put a strict filter on what is allowed to pop back into your attention. To make that note “earn its keep” by having some relevance to a real project at some point in the future. If that relevance never happens, then you don’t want to spend one extra second summarizing it.

I believe that notes follow a power law in terms of their value:

As in the graphic on the right, a very small proportion of notes (at the left edge) contains the great majority of the insight and usefulness. The rest of your notes (the right trailing edge), contain much less value. You still want to keep them around for unexpected uses, but focus your summarizing attention primarily on the high-value notes.

Here’s a breakdown of approximately how many layers I apply to my notes:

Starting at the bottom:

I only save any notes at all on about 50% of the sources I consume. This completely eliminates 1 out of 2 sources from any future consideration, which is wonderful
Half of those Layer 1 notes (or 25% of the total originally consumed) make it to Layer 2 bolding
4 out of 5 Layer 2 notes (20% of the original) make it to Layer 3 highlighting, since highlighting is relatively easy
1 out of 4 Layer 3 notes (5% of the original) make it to Layer 4 executive summary, since that takes much more energy
And I would estimate that less than 1 out of 5 Layer 4 notes (<1% of the original) make it to Layer 5 remix, since that takes a LOT of time and energy

Can you see how crazy it would be to “require” every note to make it to Layer 5? Doing so would require spending a lot more time on sources I find less interesting, at the expense of sources I find more interesting.

2. USE RESONANCE AS YOUR CRITERIA

Notice that there is no explicit criteria for deciding what to include at each layer. I’ve seen attempts to create it, but I think it’s a fool’s errand.

Applying such criteria would require System 2 analytical thinking, which is slow and tiring. Instead, we want to recruit our fast, intuitive System 1 thinking, by using “what resonates” as our criterion.