Building A Second Brain
In a time of information overload we need to separate the important from the less important information.
Notetaking apps help to us to organize and connect the information if the information is maintained properly.
Progressive summary is a pretty powerful tool, when it comes to keep notes as short as possible.
The Essence Of The Book
Information Overload
We all encounter numerous information every day ranging from conversations and meetings over topics of interest to Instagram Posts and Reels. But usually we don't have a centralized place to store all the information, so we can reaccess them easily. Instead we use different ways to keep the information available. We take Handwritten Notes and save the Posts on Instagram.
That's a very decentralized approach and the handwritten notes are limited in terms of searching them.
Notetaking Apps To The Rescue!
Storage And Retrieval
Apps like Notion, Obsidian, Evernote, and alike helps to counter that problem. Handwritten notes can be written on a computer, laptop or even a smartphone (or at least can be transcribed). That way they can be tagged marked to be relevant for certain topics. These tags usually can be searched for which will increase the likelihood to be retrieved in time of need.
Digital Information comes in different forms, such as videos, audio files, pictures, text, etc. Apps, contrary to a handwritten notebook (yes I'm guilty of that as well 😉), can usually handle a bunch of file formats which allows us to search for videos and pictures as well.
Behold the power of digitalization 😁
Progressive Summary
Usually we take a bunch of information at once, like this book summary. This is not my private summary, but rather a brief version of it.[^1] But while you were reading you probably realized I hid the details of tags by using a link to a different note. I can check on the details either by following the link or by hovering over it with my mouse, which will give me an inline view of the note. I can also link to the Storage And Retrieval-Section if I wanted to. The author Tiago Forte calls this progressive summary. Since you can hide any level of detail behind a link, the original text can shrink to a very short text, hiding all details, but still provide easy access to them.
This technique is not new. Software developers, just as an example, will know this as PIMPL-Idiom. An API provides a couple of accessible functions. The implementation details remain hidden. This provides a implementation detail, decoupled from the original access.
In our case I'm using tags now a third time inside this note. But I can also link to that particular note from all other notes inside my vault.