Note as First-class Citizen
When distilling notes, one could have many perspectives:
- Tag first: it shows connections but carries no structure and therefore no progress (to track);
- Folder first: it enforces structure and hierarchical organization but not connections;
- Note first: you can still have tags in the note and notes in a folder but the mindset here is that you put more work on the note itself. For example, making connections between notes by directly linking them and refactoring them into atomic notes or Intermediate Packets so that you can reuse them in the future.
By taking Note First mindset, you choose to enjoy your notes.
Goal of Distillation
Making your notes more:
- meaningful
- concrete
- valuable
How to Distill
Understand the layers of information Progressive Summarization:
- Raw source information
- Captured notes
- Refined notes (Bolded, Highlighted, Dissected, Grouped or Summarized)
Going through this workflow or layer of transformations, aka refining, you are essentially engaging with your notes.
Not to Do When Distilling
You Can’t Save Everything and You Don’t Need to
Compressing or distilling your notes makes everything else more efficient – easier to remember(useful) and retrieve(accessible). Your notes should not be an ever expanding archive of information.
You Can’t Analysis Everything
Following the Resonance Rule of Capturing, we also need such guidance in distillation.
We don’t necessarily have the mental energy to analyze all the captured notes, not to mention distilling all of them by scrutiny.