The Potential Side Effects of Progressive Summarization

The goal of this article is to get you to consider how you spend your time thinking, what habits you are unconsciously forming, and quality of long-term value you are creating.

“Progressive Summarization” is a method for collecting digital information — like an article — and then strategically deferring how you process it into incremental steps over time.

• This “Just in Time”-inspired method is said to reduce the time you waste on articles you process, because you don’t spend time deepening your level of processing on an article until you actually have the need to.
• “Progressive Summarization” is trying to solve a problem that comes from liberally saving tons of articles. How do you balance “Compressing / Discovering” articles you encounter while preserving their original “Context / Understanding”?

(While not the point of this article, I’ll lightly argue this is a bit of a false dilemma and misguided goal.)

tl;dr

• If overused, “Progressive Summarization” indirectly develops habits of over-collecting, over-summarizing, and under-thinking.
• Over time, it creates a digital library filled with a majority of barely summarized articles and snippets. After a decade of this habit, you may find you don’t like the digital library staring back at you. (We’ll explore this further in a future post on “Time Value”.)

Potential Side Effects of “Progressive Summarization”

With an open mind, let’s explore the underlying habits “Progressive Summarization” might indirectly develop —along the second-order effects it might create.

Over-collecting: It encourages the habit of “collecting without processing”.

It is said that “Progressive Summarization” is a tool for reducing waste. That it’s a tool for collecting, filtering, surfacing and resurfacing the best ideas with as little effort as possible.

Apparently this is because all note taking systems have to balance “Discoverability” — which comes from you processing information — and “Understanding” — which comes from you referring to original content. (This is a bit of a false dilemma… Sure, if your highest goal is to always understand the original source, then go for it. But I’d argue a higher goal should be your personal understanding of the concepts, what it relates to, and what it means to you.)

In practice, this means saving many articles, while fully processing few.

It’s said that this is a benefit so you don’t waste time over-processing less valuable information — but I’d argue that less valuable information shouldn’t have made it in your digital library in the first place!

Just like you shouldn’t allow exploitative TV shows into your media diet, you shouldn’t allow low quality content into your PKM diet. A little filtering at the start on your part is an elegantly simple solution to the problem that “Progressive Summarization” is trying to solve: balancing “Discoverability and “Understanding”.

Reduced Unique Output: A full process of “Progressive Summarization” looks like this: read, wait, bold, wait, highlight, wait, summarize the highlights, wait, and finally, remix the summary into your own words. (This is a full example. Not all steps have to be followed. Be natural here.)

This process — even if you skip some of the steps — reduces the actual time you devote to your best thinking. Your best thinking is when you are engaged in the material you encounter, relating it to other things, and finding your unique perspective amongst it all.

Less time in engaged, connective thinking = less unique perspectives to offer.

Under-learning: In terms of improving your memory or thinking ability, bolding and highlighting stuff can create a false sense of learning.

While “improving your memory and learning” is not the stated problem “Progressive Summarization” is trying to solve, it certainly doesn’t help as much as more engage, connective thinking does.

Name Confusion: “Progressive Summarization” could more accurately be called “Just in Time” Summarization. This would allow more people to discover the actual technique, because they would realize it is different from the regular act of summarizing, which it is often confused with.

Poor long-term health: Over time, the habit of collecting new articles and minimally processing the majority of them leads to the accumulation of a digital library that is foreign, unfamiliar, and unfriendly. The long-term effect is that your digital library might cause you more anxiety over time — discouraging you from even using it.

There is certainly some value to “Progressive Summarization” but you have to really be in touch with your emotional self. Are you strategically deferring or just procrastinating? Are you always deferring the work, or are you still doing the work?

Everyone has a different reason for taking and making digital notes. That said, it would be wise to consider the potential side effects of this form of Just-in-Time “Progressive Summarization”. If overused it may be knee-capping your best thinking and harming the long-term health of your digital library. Let’s explore…

The overuse of “Progressive Summarization” encourages the same thing as the industrial factory-based education system: the production of people more skilled in repeating knowledge instead of connecting and developing it.

You create much more value when you spend time developing ideas — as opposed to giving priority to consuming more while not actively engaging with the material you consume. It generates much more joy and value in your life — both in the moment and deep into the future.

Why care?

The very essence and quality of our thinking is at stake. Why relegate your best thinking to the last step in an elaborate process?

If you are a knowledge worker, an entrepreneur, or just someone who likes to think — the amount of “Progressive Summarization” you do should probably be reduced.

The Name Causes Confusion

Summarizing is the process of making sense out of the “STUFF” we encounter.

| Copying | Condensing | Reducing | Extracting | Imitating | Rewriting |

Since the beginning of humankind, summarizing has been one of the great and invaluable abilities of the human mind. Summarizing is an OG superpower.

And summarizing takes time. We don’t summarize in a single micro-second. The very act of summarizing requires a progression over time.
That’s probably why for thousands of years, there was no need to add “progressive” in front of “summarization”. It was redundant.

For example, consider our memories. Research shows that when we remember something, we are actually remembering our memory of the memory — and not the memory itself.

And guess what that “memory of a memory” is? It’s a progressive summarization of the original event.

In this very real sense, there’s no way NOT to progressively summarize something over time. We have been progressively summarizing for eons. But we just called it “summarizing”.

Here’s where the confusion starts…

Because the unique and specific method of “Progressive Summarization” created by Tiago Forte is very different. It follows “Just in Time” project management principles like: “Don’t waste time on processes or deliverables before it’s truly necessary.”

This JIT-inspired method is about choosing to defer engaging with “STUFF” now, so your Future Self can engage with it at a later date — if it makes sense then.

This distinct method certainly has some value. But the name “Progressive Summarization” is misleading. It causes Linguistic Interference where people mistake regular summarizing with the distinct JIT-inspired methodology of “Progressive Summarization.”

It also encourages over-summarizing instead of prioritizing developing your own nuanced perspective to the ideas you encounter, then connecting them with other ideas you’ve already encountered.

Let’s call this…Active Ideation (former coined “Progressive Ideation”). The name matters less than the practice, which is basically just “relating ideas as you encounter them and developing them further over time”.

“Progressive Summarization” Creates False Confidence

The Collector’s Fallacy — coined by Christian Tietze — argues that the act of “collecting” is easy. It feels like progress but it’s not.

The same can quickly become true of over-summarizing. After your initial pass of bolding and highlighting, you’ve probably done enough. Believe it or not, you’ve already reached the point of diminishing returns.

Any more emphasis on continuing to “highlight the highlights” is time better spent developing your unique take on the ideas. This is because highlighters make less progress than they think. Here’s what the research tells us:

On your first reading of something, you extract a lot of understanding. But when you do the second reading, you read with a sense of “I know this, I know this.”…and it’s insidious, because this gives you the illusion that you know the material very well, when in fact there are gaps. — Mark McDaniel, coauthor of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning¹

That’s how re-summarizing multiple times — which “Progressive Summarization” encourages — creates the illusion of progress: We mistake familiarity with ability.

This is further backed by a 2012 study that showed familiarity and recall being processed in two different parts of the brain.² Just because we are familiar with material doesn’t mean we can recall it to actually use it. It just creates a false sense of confidence that we can.

In this way, not only can we see “Progressive Summarization” as time wasted, we can also start to see how it is actually harmful!

Rereading and re-highlighting are only worth doing when the material is dense and you need to reread just to understand it. Otherwise not only is it time wasted, it can actually get in the way of making leaps of insight:

It may help…when texts are difficult, but it may actually hurt performance on higher-level tasks that require inference making.
[Highlighting and underlining] “are simple to use, do not entail training, and do not require students to invest much time beyond what is already required for reading the material.”³

Unfortunately, since it requires such low levels of engagement, the returns on your investment of time are also exceedingly low.

“Progressive Summarization” Doesn’t Encourage Your Best Thinking

Although “Progressive Summarization” — in it’s final stage — has the words “remixing” tucked into the end, it does not promote your unique commentary. It hinders it.

“Whatever you said.”

It drills in the habit of “parroting” and leads to regurgitative thinking. Sure, it has value, just the wrong kind…

• If you read stuff — not to learn from it or for the inherent joy of it — but to copy material that you can rapidly repurpose into tweets…then use “Progressive Summarization”.
• If you want to crank out lightly adjusted summaries of another person’s words, “Progressive Summarization” is perfect. You are maximizing short-term output at the expense of a deeper, long-term understanding.

And that’s fine. The world needs that too. But is that who you want to be? A parrot? Is that how you want to pay tribute to the wondrous act of thinking?⁴

“Progressive Summarization” Doesn’t Build A Dynamic Digital Library

The last major reason why “Just in Time” “Progressive Summarization” should be reduced is that it doesn’t effectively grow and evolve with you over time.

You spend the majority of your time on the ephemeral dopamine hits from “collecting” and “highlighting”. After the feel-good moment wears off (and it always wears off), what do you have to show for the time you spent?

A chaotic digital library filled with the highlights of everyone else’s words??

If you are at all serious about having dependable and dynamic digital notes — that grow and evolve over time — that is the definition of insanity.⁵

In summary…

1. “Progressive Summarization” should more accurately be called “Just in Time Summarization”
2. “Progressive Summarization” aids in creating a false sense of achievement.
3. “Progressive Summarization” doesn’t encourage fresh, insightful thinking.
4. “Progressive Summarization” doesn’t build a dynamic digital library.
5. Too much spent on this form of “Just in Time” “Progressive Summarization” steals time that you could have spent towards developing ideas and creating lasting value.

A Different Way to Spend the Same Thing

Einstein was an independent thinker was able to make leaps of insights across domains — and time.

What if instead of spending time practicing “Just in Time” Summarization, you spent the same amount of time developing your own nuanced thoughts to the ideas you encounter?

• What if there was a better way to spend your thinking time?
• What if there was a better way to create value?
• What if you could help to re-balance the ratio of your regurgitative thinking to your more independent thinking?
• What if you could compound your thinking efforts over time?

SIMULTANEOUS, RELATIONAL IDEATION is the way to spend time in a high-value activity that encourages your own independent, connective thinking — and grows with you deep into the future.

What is Active Ideation?

“Progressive Summarization” is: “Collect, Collect more, Bold, Bold, Bold, Collect, Collect more, Highlight the bolds, Highlight the Highlights, Collect, Collect, Summarize a tiny bit, Rewrite an even tinier bit. Collect more.”

Active Ideation is:

1. Highlight/Comment/Relate
2. Create/Connect/Create

For the sake of the quality of your thinking, the difference is night and day. (This is not a new concept, it’s just my take on the a process heavily inspired by the Zettelkasten method.)

• As you read, you’re actively engaged. You make highlights and comments as you go — and you’re not afraid to think in the back of your mind: “How does this relate?”
• Later, with an equally engaged mind, you create new notes from the highlights and comments, or you connect an idea with an already existing note — and you continue to create all sorts of dynamically related and growing ideas.

Just two steps. And a much greater amount of time is prioritized for you to do your best thinking! Very quickly in the process, you have already processed the material and are already working with ideas in your own words. You are not wasting time “highlighting the highlights”. You are not knee-capping your best thinking. Plus you were way more engaged with the material, but the engagement felt natural because you were having a conversation with the text. It’s like you’re sitting down with the author having a conversation. You’re ready to chime in and say, “That reminds me or SUCH AND SUCH”. You were actively thinking at a whole ‘nother level.

Marie Curie was an active, engaged, and independent thinker.

• Now you can just continue to connect your new notes to existing notes — and develop both in a thrilling dialectic!
• You’re organically asking powerful questions, “What does this relate to?”, “How does this relate?” And you start making wild connections. And guess what: you create VALUE from finding the fascinating intersections of ideas that transcend genre.
• Active Ideation is a way to spend more of your time doing your best (and most joyful) thinking.
• From these “thought intersections” in your dynamically growing digital library, you naturally start to create stuff. An article. A product. A business. Or simply a well-connected, super dependable, digital conversation partner. One that knows all the same jokes you do! One that often says, “Hey, remember when…”

And at every point along the way you are an active, engaged, and independent thinker.

Compare that to “Just in Time” “Progressive Summarization”, which prioritizes deferring your best thinking for later so you can consume more content at a surface level. You end of spending more time copying other people’s thoughts rather than developing your own.

The same amount of time spent collecting, collecting, reading, bolding, more collecting, highlighting, and even more collecting endless streams of articles could instead be spent collecting less stuff, but developing more value from the stuff you do collect — like extracting insights, writing in your own words, and building deepening relationships in your digital note collection.

You tell me which process sounds more engaging, more valuable, and more fun.

Active Ideation Creates Real Value

• When you read something new, what if you added comments as you went? (Nothing major, just some comments like you were having an engaging conversation with a friend. For example, “Hmm, this relates to BLANK”.)
• What if you converted some of that information into new notes, each representing a new idea, each written in your own words?
• What if you then linked these new ideas to existing ideas in your note library?

Wouldn’t that be nice? What if you did this 1000 times? How valuable would your digital bank of ideas be then? Why — you would have an amazing, organic, dynamic digital library of your accumulated knowledge, intuitively connected through ideas.

This is an imaginative example of how accumulated knowledge can grow into something profound.

This makes you more valuable. You have more to offer in any conversation you enter. Your thoughts have more value because you’ve related so many different, diverse things to each other.

You are no longer a regurgitation machine. You are a generation machine.

And for knowledge workers, that’s what it means to be an independent thinker. We have to take back the soul of thinking!

“Just in Time” “Progressive Summarization” is a low-value activity that encourages the bad habits of over-collecting, over-summarizing, and under-thinking. It’s a short-term means to an end.

Meanwhile, Active Ideation is a mega high-value activity. It’s an inherently joyful — and thus valuable — experience. But it’s not just inherently valuable. You are creating real in-the-moment value. You are improving as a thinker and communicator; and you are building a potent web of reusable ideas.⁶

Active Ideation says: be an active, engaged participant in the conversation, extract ideas into your own words as early in the process as you can, and start developing your own take on them, while linking them to others — and over the years your compounded value will explode.

Active Ideation Encourages Connective Thinking

Notes aren’t just static records of our thinking. Rather, we think with our notes.

— Richard Feynman

Once you start “thinking in ideas” the world becomes a fascinating place. Every situation you encounter is ripe for spotting new ideas to add to your insanely dynamic digital library. Now get this: you might encounter the same texture of an idea in a completely different context.

I know that last sentence doesn’t seem like a game-changer, but I promise you, it is. You’ll be in a position to naturally make leaps of insights between unrelated concepts across domains. A simple example is how concepts in Math rhyme with ideas in Music. Let’s explore an actual example below.

• Imagine coming across the the idea of “Mirror Neurons.” You think: “That’s a cool concept.”
• Basically, it’s the idea that when someone smiles or laughs, you’re more likely to smile or laugh as well. Or if you personified the idea, “When I dip you dip we dip”. So you make a new note called “Mirror Neurons”…

• Simultaneously, naturally, organically, you’re thinking: “What does this relate to?” “Ah yes”, you say, then you connect it to a similar concept, “Like begets like”.

• And here’s the graph view of the connections in and out of “Like begets like”.

• But then you hear that Mirror Neurons are actually a debatable phenomenon currently. Here’s why Active Ideation is so valuable: You don’t delete the note, you just add the counter-example to the note. You might branch off into a new note about the “Problems of Replication in Research”. And just like that, your note library has grown in complexity.
• I mean, how cool is that?! Not only does this system allow for excellent output of products, articles and other creations; it also just makes every moment more enjoyable for you and for others. Suddenly it’s easier to stay engaged in conversations. Suddenly, you’re making valuable leaps of insights in those same conversations. That’s value.

“Just In Time” “Progressive Summarization” does not allow for anywhere near the same level of engaged, connective thinking that this simple example of Active Ideation creates. Now multiple this by 1000. The difference is night and day.

Active Ideation Builds a Dynamic Digital Library

A graph from Ness Labs

Active Ideation gives you a massive advantage that only grows stronger as time goes on.

It focuses on merging ideas, concepts, and thoughts of other people into our own words and linking these new ideas into the web of knowledge we’ve already developed. THIS is how our knowledge grows! This is how we learn and improve. This is how you should go about “building” your digital companion.

This solution is basically the zettelkasten approach which converts the author’s words into your words much earlier in the process and then assimilates whatever you extracted into your growing body of knowledge (via links).

In this way, you spend more time developing your thoughts (compounding value), as opposed to progressively curating other people’s thoughts.

If “Just in Time” “Progressive Summarization” adds $1 to your personal GDP, Active Ideation adds $100 of value that continues to compound over time. Your digital library grows in value as you naturally add more ideas, examples, and connections within it. So without much effort, you are dynamically evolving and building the complexity and relationships of your accumulated collection of ideas over time. Learn something new. Add it to the library. Connect it to existing knowledge.

But what if the new stuff I add contradicts the old stuff? Even better! You just link the new stuff with the old stuff and add your commentary. Now you already have built a high-level argument. This means: your digital library grows stronger from the randomness of life.⁷

We Need You

Whether you a “knowledge worker”, an entrepreneur, a creative professional, or just someone who likes to think… We need you.

We need you to be your best self. We need you to share your unique perspective and ideas with the rest of us.

I hope you can now clearly see how “Just in Time” “Progressive Summarization” dangerously relegates your best thinking to the end of a process that you often won’t even get to.

I hope you can see how Active Ideation keeps you engaged and creative at every step of the way.

Stop over-collecting and “highlighting the highlights” and to start building clear, re-usable notes.
These “evergreen” notes are the building blocks of original thought. And they are anti-fragile: they actually grow in value over time!

The thoughts of other people are great fertilizer for our thoughts. However, your focus shouldn’t be on the busywork summarizing the highlights of someone else’s work; your focus should be on creating your own work. You should spend time on the actions that create value — which are note-making and ideation — as opposed to the actions that merely feel good: storing and summarizing other people’s ideas.

I used to think “education” was part of the solution to many of the world’s problems. I’ve changed my mind. Only the right education is.

• “Just in Time” “Progressive Summarization” may defers your thinking until “someday maybe”.
• Active Ideation keeps you active and engaged throughout the process — encouraging better, more valuable contributions to the world that surrounds you.

We can assume Maya Angelou wasn’t “highlighting the highlights.”

A healthy world needs citizens who think, who question, who develop thoughts and ideas over time and build bridges across different domains.

Imaginative, connective thinkers.

We need fascinating, able citizens. Citizens encouraged to think for themselves — and in the process — help provide a better future for us all.

We need you to spend the majority of your time developing your thoughts and your nuanced perspective to the ideas you encounter.

Because a better you will make us all better.

When it comes to thinking, we need you to

Have an opinion? Please comment below. If you found this article interesting, you can follow me on Twitter where I’ll continue to share similar ideas.

I’m launching the next Linking Your Thinking workshop. Learn more about how to build your custom PKM system here.

Want to confidently build your note library so you can supercharge your thinking — not just for today, but for decades from now?

Have you wondered why GTD doesn’t work for your knowledge work? Have you realized that the heavy use of folders restricts your ability to think at a sustained high level? Do you want to build something that grows in value over time?

This is the power of LINKING YOUR THINKING: a system inspired by the Zettelkasten methodology and built on fluid frameworks that will supercharge your thinking today — and deep into the future.

[1]: McDaniel and Brown, Peter C. (2014). Make it stick : the science of successful learning. Cambridge, Massachusetts :The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,

[2]: Ryals, A. J., Cleary, A. M., & Seger, C. A. (2013). Recall versus familiarity when recall fails for words and scenes: the differential roles of the hippocampus, perirhinal cortex, and category-specific cortical regions. Brain research, 1492, 72–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2012.10.068

[3]: Dunlosky J, Rawson KA, Marsh EJ, Nathan MJ, Willingham DT. Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychol Sci Public Interest. 2013;14(1):4–58. doi:10.1177/1529100612453266

[4]: The obvious exception to this is with the part of academic work that requires citations. But as a standard operating procedure, “PS” fosters non-originality.

[5]: There are two exceptions where the mass collection of other people’s thought is generally good: for academics who need to collect research papers and cite them, and for people perfectly happy to passively put together commonplace books.

[6]: This will be the subject of another article on “second-order effects” like Antifragility, Optionality, Flow, and the positive hijacking of our built-in Novelty Bias.

[7]: This is antifragility in action. More on this another time.