Our most scarce resource is time, which means we need to prioritize our ability to quickly rediscover the ideas that we already have in our Second Brain.

More is not better when it comes to thinking and creating. Distilling makes our ideas small and compact, so we can load them up into our minds with minimal effort.

The effort we put into Progressive Summarization is meant for one purpose: to make it easy to find and work with our notes in the future.

Distillation is at the heart of the communication that is so central to our friendships, our working relationships, and our leadership abilities. Notetaking gives you a way to deliberately practice the skill of distilling every day.

Don’t worry about analyzing, interpreting, or categorizing each point to decide whether to highlight it. That is way too taxing and will break the flow of your concentration. Instead, rely on your intuition to tell you when a passage is interesting, counterintuitive, or relevant to your favorite problems or a current project.

The most common question I hear about Progressive Summarization is “When should I be doing this highlighting?” The answer is that you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something.

A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer.

When it comes to notetaking for work, less is more. You can capture entire books, articles with dozens of pages, or social media posts by the hundreds. No one will stop you, but you’ll quickly learn that such volume will only create a lot more work later on when you have to figure out what all that information means. If you’re going to capture

The biggest mistake people make when they start to distill their notes is that they highlight way too much. You may have experienced this pitfall in school, highlighting paragraph after paragraph or entire pages of textbooks in the vain hope that you’d automatically be able to remember everything in yellow for the test.