title: 用于chatgpt 阅读理解的一个英文文章demo
date created: 28 February 2023
date modified: 14 March 2023

Designing discoverable notes ¶

A note-first approach to knowledge management means we have to think about design. You are, in a very real sense, designing a product for a demanding customer—Future You.

Future You doesn’t necessarily trust that everything Past You put into your notes is valuable. Future You is impatient and skeptical, demanding proof upfront that the time they spend reviewing notes will be worthwhile. You’ve gotta “sell them” on the idea of reviewing a given note, including all the stages any salesperson has to master: gainingattention, inspiringinterest, establishingcredibility, stokingdesire, and making a case foractionNOW.

As if all that wasn’t intimidating enough, you have to do this for every single note without spendingany extra time. You don’t have extra time, do you?

Let’s start at the beginning: at the heart of every design, we are trying to balance priorities. You want one thing, but it has to be balanced against something else that youalsowant.

You want a vehicle to protect its occupants, but you can’t just add layers and layers of titanium armor plating. You have to balance safety against weight and cost.

You want a phone to have the longest possible battery life, but you can’t just give it a 10-pound brick of a battery. You have to balance battery life against size and usability.

In the case of notes, I believe the two priorities we are trying to balance arediscoverabilityandunderstanding.

Making a notediscoverableinvolves making it small, simple, and easy to digest. We accomplish this using**compression:**creating highly condensed summaries, without all the fluff.

But we also want to make our notesunderstandable. This involves including all thecontext: the details, the examples, and cited sources to be sure nothing falls through the cracks.

This is a difficult tradeoff becauseyou cannot compress something without losing some of its context.

You cannot summarize an article without discarding most of its points. You cannot make a highlight reel of a video without cutting out most of the footage. You cannot give an 18-minute TED talk without leaving out most of your ideas.

In making decisions about what to keep, you are inevitably making decisions about what to throw away.