Turning Notes in Notion into Usable Tools
I Tried Tiago Forte’s “Progress Summarization” on my Notes, Here’s What Happened…
Question: Do you view your notes as a collection of random thoughts or as a potential goldmine of ideas?
As creatives and content creators, we can often find ourselves overwhelmed with a collection of random, disjointed notes. We spend hours poring over these notes, trying to make sense of the information we captured - whether it’s web clips, Kindle highlights, bookmarked blogposts or a hand written stream thought.
We know these notes contain valuable insights and potential content ideas, but the process of sifting through them and extracting those gems can be a frustrating and time-consuming task.
Why Can’t I Just “Be Creative”?
How this hits me is decreased productivity, creative blocks, and even burnout. It makes me feel like I’m wasting my time, as I spend more hours sifting through my notes than actually creating content. Or worse, I procrastinate and put things off.
And this leads me to the struggle of turning what was a creative spark of inspiration into a coherent, valuable piece of content.
Transforming the Struggle
So if you’re feeling like your creative energy has also been sapped by this struggle, or you’re feeling drained and uninspired by your scattered notes, let me introduce you to a process that can transform your notes into a treasure trove for future use.
Turning Scattered Notes into Usable Tools
In case you didn’t know this month’s Book Club book is Tiago Forte’s “Building a Second Brain (affiliate link)”, and Chapter 6 of the book discusses the process of distilling our notes to find the essence.
This process can help us maximise our notes because it teaches us to see them as tools to be used by our impatient future self rather than just collection of scattered ideas.
Introducing a Process Worth Putting it into Action
The process involves capturing notes quickly and refining them later for easy discoverability. In the book Tiago introduces us to his system called "Progressive Summarisation”, a method of distilling notes into key points through several layers of highlighting, using technology to make the note more usable at a later date.
The process results in a pyramid-like structure with captured notes at the bottom layer as the first stage of note taking, bolded and highlighted passages in the middle layers as the 2nd and 3rd stage of note taking, and executive summaries at the top as the final stage.
The aim of this distilling and refining process is to make information compact, easy to digest, and accessible for future use.
“Progressive Summarization” aka Running Ideas Through a Filter
So essentially, “Progressive Summarization” is where we refine the concept of the captured note through several layers of distillation as a process for developing our ideas. Tiago’s method for note taking and distilling is:
Layer 1 - Save only the best excerpts from the information you want to create notes on, this is the first stage of note taking and it’s where many people end their note taking process.
Layer 2 - Read through the excerpts you’ve captured and bold only the most important take-aways or key points.
Layer 3 - Highlight (or underline) only the best of best passages from layer 2 (the excerpts you made bold). BE EXTREMELY SELECTIVE about what makes the highlight :-)
Finally - Revisit the note at a later date (set a reminder), re-read your highlighted notes (from layer 3), are you able to quickly understand what the note is about from just your layer 3 highlights? If not, re-distil your note.
The Show and Tell Segment
In the screencast below I share how I’ve tweaked this slightly for my Notion set up, as well as how I’m using AI to assist me with creating summaries.
Do reach out if you have any questions or what me go more in depth on anything I may have skipped over!
Chloe x
Please note: I found the Audible book mentioned in this article through my own research, personally purchased and listened to it for my own use before writing this blog post, but as an Amazon Associate I earn from any qualifying purchases you may make after clicking these links.