You're going to forget that book you are reading, would you?

Stop forgetting all that you read. How much do you remember about the book that you just have read? Maybe 10% or 5%? How long does it take for your notes to lose meaning? Make the first step that this won't happen again. Let's dive in!.

Hello folks! This week in My open brain I'm going to write about the zettelkasten method and progressive summarization. For me, discover these two concepts, has been a life-changing event that help me to tackle 3 of my biggest pains: continuous learning, tagging, and summarizing content.

As Andy Matuschak says in his article "Why books don't work", people take for granted that they absorb knowledge by reading sentences or hearing. And that is far from true. If you want to learn you have to go deeper than just reading a sentence or listen to a person talking.

This hard truth or false myth, you can see clearly in a conversation about a book you read in the past. Depending on the time that you red it, you can sketch the basic claims, remember some stories of the book, but when someone asks a basic probing question, you open your eyes about how little did you absorb from that book.

As Andy Matuschak says in his article "Why books don't work", tens of millions of hours spent, in exchange for all that time, how much knowledge was absorbed? How many people absorbed most of the knowledge the author intended to convey? Or even just what they intended to acquire?

The three rules to absorb real knowledge from books

1. Actively engage with the knowledge summarizing it.

Applying strategies like doodling, writing chapter summaries, doing creative projects, trying to rewrite an article or parts of a book tells your brain that is worth storing that new information. Also makes you create deliverables that synthesize the information into tiny bits easier to remember, so you are going to be able to hold the information for longer and teach others with it.

2. The protégé effect: how you can learn by teaching others.

The protégé effect is a psychological phenomenon where teaching, pretending to teach, or preparing to teach information to others helps a person learn that information faster and deeper.

I have written 18 articles since January, around 50,000 words, and really pump by it but every week I start to write I feel like it's going to be easy to write it down, to tell what I know, to help others understand a concept but the article at the end it's really different from the start. The article evolves because I keep reading and drawing in the process of making it and that's why I've been able to comprehend such complex concepts.

Teaching forces your brain to fully understand concepts and that's not only why everyone should do it. Teaching or even pretending to teach makes you organize the information better and be in a flow state more often, for that reason, you learn even more than the people that you are teaching.

3. Atomize the ideas to combine the new with the old.

A lecture, a book, or a video are a group of Ideas that are connected by the author. What you need to do first for learning is to atomize the content into smaller bits. The atomization of things is becoming a trend in knowledge management thanks to people like Niklas Luhmann (1927 - 1998) who was one of the first to do it with his method "zettlekasten".

A zettlekasten consists of a box with many individual notes that are taken down as they occur or are acquired. After you acquired the notes you can combine them with each other to create new content. In this way, Luhmann could store and retrieve information related to their research which made him a prolific author. Over the course of his lifetime, he wrote over 70 books and hundreds and hundreds of scholarly articles.

He differentiates two types of notes:

• Literature notes: What he was learning about what he was reading.
• Own thoughts: What were his thoughts had when he was reading the article.

The combination of the two types of notes enhances creativity and made it more valuable the resulted content. Because it wasn't only what he learned it was also what connections with his old knowledge he saw during the reading experience.

For allowing the researcher to perceive connections and relationships between individual items of information, the notes are numbered hierarchically, so that new notes may be inserted at the appropriate place and contain metadata to allow the note-taker to associate notes with each other. For example, notes may contain tags that describe key aspects of the note, and they may reference other notes. The numbering, metadata, format, and structure of the notes are subject to variation depending on the specific method employed.

Getting notes more atomic is easier than tagged them. You can have hundreds of notes from a book but the dilemma is how to tag them for being able to find them quickly in the future.

Creating and using a zettelkasten approach is easier now thanks to the digital tools. Technology allows us now to have a system as powerful as Luhmann had without the need to store 90,000 index cards as Luhmann had. But also technology allows us to consume much more content so to tag it for being able to find them quickly in the future has become really difficult and Luhmann's way to do it in many cases is not enough.

How you can build a system that allows you to store and transfer the knowledge through time

As I said before, tagging is the hard part. How are you going to tag something now to be able to connect it with something in the future? As Tiago Forte says: There are three primary ways to tag notes:

1.Tagging-first: There is not a hierarchy set because many tags can be applied to one note and there are multiple pathways to discover any given note. 

Tiago Forte says: "That the problem with this approach is. The virtual matrix sounds cool and futuristic, but our minds are not made to work well with such abstract concepts" for me, it's more simple, it can lead to a chaotic mess quickly, tends to need a lot of maintenance. And even maintaining the system, removing and merging low use tags. Notes are less discoverable because it's hard to remember the tag you put it.

2. Notebook-first:

This is the most intuitive way of saving notes. We understand placing one thing in one place, intuitively and automatically. Also, because notes that are in the same notebook are more likely to be connected it's easier to see connections and patterns, but you are unlikely to see the connection and patterns of notes outside the same notebook.

3. Note-first:

This approach the best yet created but hard to understand. Note-first means that you have to think like you are designing a product.

You are designing the note for somebody else or your future self. You got a make the note attractive to convince them to review it. Your future self is impatient and no one wants to read again things that don't give them value so as Forte says: "The note has: gaining attention, inspiring interest, establishing credibility, stoking desire"

The two critical and antagonist elements of creating a note are:

• Discoverability: Making a note discoverable involves making it small, simple, and easy to digest. We accomplish this using compression: creating highly condensed summaries.
• Understanding: to make our notes understandable. This involves including all the context: the details, the examples, and cited sources to be sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Our brain tends to reduce the information we remember, How many times have you want to reread an article, but you only remember the author or part of the title? That's why in my case, to make notes more discoverable I use these entities:

• Author( TOP SPEAKERS).
• Area (AREAS): Which area of my life I will improve if I review the note?
• Type of content ( Info storage ): image that you want to see a video instead of reading an article.

Having those entities makes my notes more discoverable, but in notes with a lot of content like a book, how I make the note more discoverable aka easier to review? The best way that I found is progressive summarization.

Having layers of content in the note allows me to scan the note quickly, but if I want to go deeper I'm also able to. I know that sounds complicated and that is going to consume you a lot of time, but it isn't.

We are going to make right now a progressive summarization. If you want to get deeper into this here you have a remarkable video made by Daniel Langewisch about how to do a progressive summarization in notion.

Let's dive in

We are going to take this article as an example to do a progressive summarization, There are five layers, usually, you're going to do them over a course of time you don't just do them all in one day you let your notes slowly turning into something that's useful, but for learning purpose, we are going to do it all now. I'm going to be using notion, but you can use the software that you like:

1. Read the article and highlight the content that resonate the most with you and decide if it's worth it to progressive summarize the article.

Layer 0 - Read and highlight

2. Create a note and copy the raw notes into our new note.

Layer 1 - Raw notes

3. Bold the passage that you find more interesting within your notes.

Layer 2 - Bold passages

4. Highlight just the key main points within the bolded sections once you have.

Layer 3 - Highlights

5. Create a mini summary of the entire content that you took down at the top of the page

Layer 4 - Essential summary

6. Remix into an original creation.

Layer 5 - Remix into original creation

Thank you to read the article, I will be writing articles in the future to help you to build your second brain, if you don't want to lose it subscribe to my newsletter, also join our group to be in contact with more people building a second brain ;)