Strategic Synthesis: Progressive Summaries Shaping Your Second Brain

In a recent article I delved into why you need to engage with your notes to increase their value. For effective learning, our brain requires challenges. Merely jotting down notes passively may serve as information storage, but engaging with your notes can elevate them into a productivity booster.

In this article I want to give you a deeper dive into one of the methods you can use for engaging with your notes: the progressive summary.

Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

What is a progressive summary?

Essentially, I see progressive summarization as writing a “summary of a summary”.

When I started productivity journey, the number of notes I took and with it the amount of information I had quickly grew. It grew to an amount which craves for structurization and techniques for quick review.

When taking notes digitally, they tend to become quite extensive. Once we master 10 finger writing, we can write 60 words per minute and more. This is more than three times faster than fast handwriting (15-20 wpm). As it is easier to capture a lot of information digitally, we tend to do it. During meetings and when taking digital notes from books, we overestimate the information’s value and write down a lot.

I do not have the time to keep it short. - unknown

I believe the quote aptly captures the situation: writing extensive notes is a simple task. We copy most of what was said or what we read and just slightly paraphrase. However, this is mere information-capture and does not help with (i) recalling information and (ii) utilizing the gathered information.

Recalling Information

To recall, we need to engage with the information. We have to ask ourselves questions about the topic at hand such as:

• What are the main ideas?
• If I could implement one idea, which one would it be?
• How would I describe the topic to a friend - what key points would I highlight?

Crafting brief summaries of your notes not only accelerates your review process, but also enables you to seamlessly weave together diverse ideas from your past notes.

Utilizing the gathered information

To leverage the gathered information effectively, it is essential to integrate it with our existing knowledge-base. Combining information with knowledge needs us to create an overview of similar topics and recognizing patterns and synergies. To accomplish this, brief summaries can help us to put different sources together more quickly - it is the quick starter for knowledge-synthesis.

Where can you apply the technique?

Recall what you read

In Recall and Reflect, I described my personal techniques to remember what I read. At its core is notetaking.

You can only utilize information you remember, and you most likely remember those things better if you wrote them down - or at least, you could pick up the information again if you need it.

If you read a book and you have made it a habit to take notes while reading, they can become extensive quite quickly. To get control over the core insights, craft a personal summary.

This isn’t just an ordinary summary. Neither is this summary crafted for others. It’s your quick route to refreshing those valuable insights in your working memory whenever you need them. Consider it your secret ingredient for retaining what you’ve learned.

Curate your meeting notes to a knowledge-base

In the corporate world, notes are places where we store insights from meetings. More often than not they become some kind of cold storage for information - seldom revisited. One of the main reasons for this is, that we do not take the time to re-read 5.000-word meeting minutes to retrieve one valuable insight.

Let me clarify: the information is available, but pinpointing the two crucial sentences amid a vast note repository can be challenging.

Crafting concise summaries after meetings significantly enhances information retrieval later on. A good 100-word summary of a lengthy meeting aids in quickly recapping essential takeaways, saving time and energy to apply insights to the specific context for which you need the notes.

The key ingredients of a good summary

• Brief: A good summary must be as brief as possible. Avoid all kinds of fluff and focus on the most important insights.
• Personal: Notes are inherently personal tools designed to aid information recall. When summarizing, it’s not about sharing insights with others: instead, consider what information will be crucial for your future reference when revisiting the topic. Focus on details that will serve your later needs and help reinforce your memory.
• Linked: I can’t stress this enough: links are a powerhouse for productivity and creativity. When you summarize your notes, oftentimes similar topics will come to your mind. Seize the opportunity and add links (and backlinks) to the summary you are writing. It will come in handy later on!

Use progressive summarization to weave a knowledge-web.

In our information-saturated world, having a personal knowledge-base at hand that stores all information we gathered is a true productivity-booster.

There exist many different strategies on how to craft a “Second Brain” such as folder-structures, PARA, the slip box (or in the original German: “Zettelkasten”), …

I personally use a combination of different techniques with PARA at its core. If you are interested in my personal approach, check out this article.

The important aspect of a “Second Brain” is to combine knowledge from different sources. To me the key aspect here are links and backlinks. When you use linking, you utilize the network effect: the value of a network grows by the elements squared. Your “Second Brain” becomes more useful the more interlinked its elements are - not just by adding new information.

But how is this related to progressive summarization?

Doing knowledge-synthesis becomes easier the more condensed the information you are working with is. Imagine the following: When you want to combine 12 different sources and each source is a 500-word text, you must work through 6.000 words. If you just read it once it takes more than 22 minutes. However, for doing knowledge synthesis, you will have to read it multiple times and quickly you spent more than one hour on just reviewing your notes.

Now imagine having a 50-word summary at hand per topic: Reading all the 12 sources only takes about 2 minutes. This has two effects: on the one hand, you can read the information much faster and save time, but on the other hand (and more importantly) the information is more condensed: it is easier to keep all the information in your working memory making knowledge synthesis a breeze.

Learnings & Conclusion

In this article, I’ve expressed my personal perspective on why I believe progressive summarization is a technique ideally suited for enhancing your notetaking. Keeping brief summaries of various notes, topics, and sources readily available allows you to swiftly revisit previously learned subjects and bring valuable insights back into your working memory.

These progressive summaries have the potential to become the backbone of your Second Brain, elevating your personal knowledge management to the next level – at least for me this was the case.