Edition no.13. April 27th, 2023

Distill represents the 1st important step from:

• Divergence to Convergence

• Consuming to Creating

• Collecting to Using

• Being Passive to Active

Unfortunately, this is the hardest step in the CODE Framework.

Distilling requires something that has become increasingly rare, and it is Focus.

More than focus, distilling requires space.

The moment Isaac Newton discovered gravity, he was silent.

As a hyperactive society, we have become used to filling every little moment of time and space with distraction. And this has serious consequences on our ability to think for ourselves and find our own perspective.

You must stop reacting to distill.

You need space in order to get in touch with your own thoughts and opinions.

There is no space to distill if you are always cramming some new piece of information into your brain.

Stop.

• Stop consuming.

• Stop capturing.

• Stop reacting.

Start creating.

💬 4 Quotes

Quote 1

This is what Cole calls the Golden Rule of online writing:

Create more than you consume.

This is how you become a better writer.

And it applies perfectly to Knowledge Management.

This is how you become a better thinker.

You don't learn from capturing and organizing. You learn by processing knowledge and thinking about it.

True progress comes from creation.

True progress comes from proactivity.

Quote 2

Music is a great way to bring the importance of Distilling.

That's because distilling depends on your taste.

Distilling depends on your opinion.

Music bring your unique taste.

Music brings emotional reactions, beautiful sensations and deep feelings towards a rhythm or a lyric.

Your emotional reaction is your guide when distilling.

Because distilling is about what resonates.

What is it in your note that is special.

What do you really want to save?

Quote 3

It's impossible to distill if you're busy.

Let me repeat this: It's impossible to distill if you're busy.

To connect with your taste, you must have space.

Only in the solitude and silence of your mind will you truly interpret and distill something.

The act of distilling is very easy.

Finding time to distill is very hard.

Distilling is about finding the time to do it.

Distilling is habit formation.

The habit of turning off consumption and capturing.

The habit of turning on analysis and critical thinking.

The habit of stopping, of allowing space.

This could be done both with:

• A deep session of reviewing your notes thoroughly.

• A few seconds thinking about a note and improving it somehow.

Quote 4

Now we arrive at the heart of distilling.

Taking away.

Striping ideas down to their core essentials.

Simplifying.

Less, but better.

📄 3 Notes

1. Compression of Ideas

Compressed ideas are better!

When you compress something, magic happens:

• You increase the density of information.

• 'Merely good' gives space to 'truly great'.

• Mediocre ideas stop diluting ideas that are amazing.

Compressed messages also travel faster and farther.

In Brazil, there is this children's game called 'telefone sem fio’, (phone with no cable). In this game, one person whispers a message to another one, and this person whispers it to the next person, and so on, until the original message comes back to the 1st person.

99% of the time, the original message is totally different, because along the way, people misinterpret what was said and don't pass along the complete message.

An uncompressed message doesn't travel far.

It gets lost.

This is why you compress a note:

• So its essence survives.

Compression is about boiling ideas down into their pure, dense, rich essence.

Every time you compress a note, you are stripping off the non-essentials.

You improve quality by adding density to few parts that matter.

2. The Paradox of Distilling

This process of compressing leads to a paradox.

The central idea of distilling is to focus on less, but better.

But in order to focus on less, you must add information.

This creates a paradox: You want to focus on less, but at the same time you want to add information.

This paradox is solved by an interesting idea:

• Metadata

You are adding data, but it's not more data, it's better data.

You add Metadata, which is data about the data.

Adding Metadata increases the density of one piece of knowledge.

• You add depth to a note.

• You make it clearer.

• You make it better.

So yes, you're adding information, but this information reduces the amount of knowledge that matters.

3. Ways to Upgrade Your Notes

Upgrade a note = add Metadata to the Note.

The purpose of adding Metadata is to make a knowledge more Discoverable.

How do I make this knowledge easy to rediscover for my future self?

This question has 2 meanings:

1. Make the Note discoverable

2. Make the Knowledge discoverable

1. Make the Note discoverable:

• How to find (retrieve) the note

• Change Title

• Links to other Notes

• Links to Projects/Areas

2. Make the Knowledge discoverable

• How can the knowledge in this note be easier to identify

• How can the knowledge in this note be easier to understand

Change how the note looks.

This will make the actual knowledge easier to find and understand, once you have the note open.

Simplify, compress the knowledge into a clearer, easier way to interpret.

There are 2 main types of Metadata:

• Formal Metadata (Fields)

• Visual Metadata (Formatting)

Formal Metadata is exclusive to some apps, Tana for example.

Visual Metadata is available in most, if not all, notetaking apps.

The combination of these 2 types of Metadata will be able to make the Note and the Knowledge inside each note more discoverable.

There are many ways you can upgrade your notes with Metadata:

• Change the title of a note

• Share a note with someone

• Add a Topic tag to the note

• Tag Concepts used in the note

• Connect the note to another one

• Combine notes into a greater note

• Bold or Highlight excerpts from a note

• Move or Link a note so it is more actionable

• Make the note Clearer (add or remove words)

This is a long list.

Instead of trying to do everything, choose your 3 favorite items from this list and focus just on these 3 ways to improve notes.

You'll be much more likely to remember them.

🔗 2 Links

Link 1: Prolific Researcher Mentorship, by Bianca Pereira

For all Researchers out there!

Bianca Pereira is launching a new batch of her Mentorship program.

It's a mixture of a Cohort based course with a 5-month mentorship to implement the practices, mindsets, and techniques she teaches.

I will be a Guest Mentor at her mentorship program, teaching students the Fundamentals of Tana (applied to research)

If you're interested, check it out:

Link 2: Progressive Summarization example by Tiago Forte

In this video, Tiago does a live Progressive Summarization of his notes.

It's interesting to see how easy this process is.

We usually just don't take the time to actually do these simple steps.

That's it. Thank you for reading!

See you next week, my friend!

Cheers,

Fis