I got this question from one of the participants in the current Attention Compass group training – “What should I be recording/capturing?”
I had mentioned that I kept Book Notes. There was some debate on the usefulness of capturing Book Notes, around the usefulness/efficiency/etc. of broad capture of information.
For about 75 years now, people have been thinking about ‘ubiquitous capture”. I’ll argue that we’ve entered phase three. It’s quite within technical reach, IMO, with Smart Glasses (although I’m not sure that’s the purpose).
The question is: what evidence is there that it would be useful.
The point is – how much information should we be trying to keep and how do we know when we’ve got it covered. How much technology should I be using?
We’ll take that on in today’s episode.
The two primary challenges of capture
- It’s hard to predict what will be useful
- It has a cost, so we want to be efficient. Cost = 1-storage, and 2-review
- (processing)
- Cost 1 is falling rapidly
- Cost 2 may be subject to AI intervention
The history of ubiquitous capture
- Memex
- Ph.D. reading and Book Notes
- Google glass
- Now – Meta smart glasses
Better/worse ways to read (from an information capture standpoint)
- “How To Read a Book” – use the parts of a book
- Example, TOC has two main purposes
- 1) find for second reading
- 2) pose questions for first reading what’s an index?
- Make Book Notes
- The notes become the index, which is stored in the book – how can I use that?
- challenges to making Book Notes
But how DO we read
- Reading fiction is different than reading non fiction.
- We just expect to gain pleasure or alleviation of boredom from reading fiction.
- We don’t have a habit of reading in an environment that’s conducive to taking notes
Why Book Notes
- What are ‘book notes’ – summary of takeaways
- Purpose: I don’t have to reread the book to verify/remember the information I need.
- Reading apps like Kindle are not all the way there; best is to just have some copy paper in there and a pen
- This makes associating our thoughts with a physical book pretty straightforward
How much capture is too much?
- Extending the book notes model
- Indexing information that we consume.
- If we’re in an information/attention economy, then how do we practice ‘economy’ in gathering information?
- we’re utilizing our attention to create information, we need to do it well/efficiently
- our brains are unreliable when we consume information
- Back to books / Ph.D. reading
- Hard to manage the information when we read a lot of books
Beyond books and book notes – toward ubiquitous capture
- One problem – how do we store our own thoughts
- Brains are not real reliable storage mechanisms
- We don’t know exactly what information we’ll need later
- Make some notes to yourself; it’s a waste of time to have to re-consume all the information in order to recall the nugget that we wanted
The technological road to Memex
- Phase 1 – virtual assistant to transcript your meetings
- Phase 2 – zoom avatar to attend the meeting
- Phase 3 – a Memex-like system via (e.g.) Meta Smart Glasses
The big difference is AI, so the question comes down to How much do you trust AI?