Source → your notes → bold → highlights → executive summary → remix
Source
Progressive Summarization is a note annotation technique to be applied to notes in-place, possibly weeks/months/years after they are taken. The concept is to clarify what’s important In each note over time, as is convenient.
The Layers
Tiago Forte’s layering method. Mine would be a bit different.
Layer 0 is the base material upon which you’re writing notes. Most capture this into their systems directly. I chose not to.
Layer 1 is all your notes. This is what you take when reading or learning about whatever subject.
Layer 2 is bolded passages. This is your rough cut of what’s most important while you’re reading it.
Layer 3 is highlighted passages. This (should) be a subset of all the bolded passages.
Layer 4 is a summarization of the content of the note, placed at the top of the note like an abstract.
Layer 5 is when you make the note your own by writing about it, making a drawing or a chart, or whatever other creative remixing you’d like to do.
At any point after you finish, you may choose to go back and apply the next layer of summarization. This is called opportunistic compression. It allows what’s important to surface naturally over time.