Know when not to process: most notes are fine as-is

Not every note needs progressive summarization — most notes serve their purpose as raw captures.

Why it works

Over-processing creates a false sense of productivity while consuming the time that should go to creative output. Most notes — reference material, factual lookups, brief context captures — are used once and then archived. Applying progressive summarization to these provides no benefit because no future use will trigger retrieval. The selection filter ("is this note worth returning to?") is the meta-practice that makes the whole system efficient.

How to do it

1. When you save a note, ask: "Is this something I am likely to return to more than once?"
2. If not, leave it in raw form — searchable and archived, but not a candidate for processing.
3. Reserve layer-one highlighting for notes that either surprised you or that you can already imagine using in future work.
4. Think of processed notes as a 10–15% subset of everything you capture, not the whole collection.

Evidence

The insight that note-processing effort should be proportional to expected future use is a straightforward application of expected-value reasoning — a practical principle rather than a studied intervention. The underlying observation that most captured content is never revisited is consistent with information-seeking behavior research. (mechanistic)

What percentage of notes is worth processing varies by domain and by how densely interconnected a person’s work is; the "10–15%" figure is an approximation, not a studied norm.

Common mistake

Applying progressive summarization to every note indiscriminately, which turns note-taking into a heavy maintenance system and shifts the goal from "build a useful second brain" to "maintain an elaborate filing system."