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Rinse and Repeat - Research, Read, Assimilate

Source: The Collector’s Fallacy

I rarely consult secondary sources again. If I have to do so, it means that I did not do the job right the first time.

If we read without taking notes, our knowledge increases for a short time only. Once we forget what we knew, having read the text becomes worthless. You can bet that you’ll forget about the text’s information one day. It’s guaranteed. Thus, reading without taking notes is just a waste of time in the long run. It’s as if reading never happened.

That’s the reason we are used to picking up a reference text again and again when we work on our writing projects. We read and take the information from the text, put it in our short-term memory, get back to our own draft and pour in the information. We transfer information from one place to another but fail to increase our knowledge on the way. That’s the usual, inefficient way.

It’s only rational to take notes when you read a text because a system of notes can become an extension to your mind and memory. This will integrate the text’s information into our own knowledge. To increase one’s knowledge is a meaningful and the only sustainable way of working with information. Instead of shoveling information from the source text into your own project with the help of your working memory, you can integrate it into your knowledge system once and have it available forever. We may expand our knowledge permanently only by storing notes permanently.

Taking notes thoroughly means you can rely on your notes alone and rarely need to look up a detail in the original text.

This is a first step to conquer Collectors Fallacy: to realize that having a text at hand does nothing to increase our knowledge. We have to work with it instead. Reading alone won’t suffice: we have to create notes, too, to create real, sustainable knowledge.

Shorter cycles of research, reading, and knowledge assimilation are better than long ones. With every full cycle from research to knowledge assimilation, we learn more about the topic. When we know more, our decisions are more informed, thus our research gets more efficient. If, on the other hand, we take home a big pile of material to read and process, some of it will turn out be useless once we finished parts of the pile. To minimize waste, both of time and of paper, it’s beneficial to immerse oneself step by step and learn on the way instead of making big up-front decisions based on guesswork.

The Knowledge Cycle

To form a habit, you have to set yourself actionable limits and keep score.

  • To get started, do research for one hour and no second more. Process the collected material until the stack is empty.
  • Then do a quick review of the cycle: how well did it go? Did you learn something new? Was it too much or too little you found in the amount of time?
  • Afterwards, change the time limit a bit if you think it wasn’t appropriate.

Repeat the cycle and keep track of your perceived productivity until you establish a feedback-supported routine.

The Knowledge Cycle Collectors Fallacy Note Taking and The Internet Best Practices Information Flow

Backlinks:

list from [[Rinse and Repeat - Research, Read, Assimilate]] AND -"Changelog"