A couple of essays ago, I proposed a 4-step guide to beating Collector's Fallacy.
Read like a hawk
Use notes as cues
Generalize concepts
Define clear next steps
This is great King, but what about Progressive Summarization?
Coined by Tiago Forte, Progressive Summarization is a way of highlighting text in articles or books, and then later, doing more highlighting. It's like highlights of highlights of highlights. But, you don't have to choose between Progressive Summarization and keeping your notes short and actionable. You can do both!
So, first of all, progressive summary and keeping your reading-notes short and actionable aren't mutually exclusive. 😉
Progressive Summary can be extremely useful.
It's great if you want to be able to search a book's text inside your pkm later. But, if you don't need to do that, you can use a Kindle and get similar results.
Also, highlighting obviously helps identify passages when you review a book.
The only thing to be careful of with highlighting is that it can make you a passive reader. Generalization, on the other hand, requires active reading. 😆
'Theres' even research indicating highlighting may harm one's ability to learn and recall information.' - Scott Scheper, author of Antinet Zettelkasten
The only thing I was advocating for is simply
Keep notes short (so that the work doesn't feel overwhelming)
Keep notes actionable (so no system thinking is required)
The 4 steps, funny enough, actually fit Tiago Forte's concepts of Just-In-Time.
Do you highlight 50% of your books? Would love to hear your thoughts!