Ingestion
I call one category of intellectual activity ingestion. The canonical example of this is learning something: I encounter information, structure it as flashcards, put the flashcards in my spaced repetition system, and learn it forever.
Sometimes, though, what I'm after isn't learning facts. Ingestion also includes:
- Trying something I want to try;
- Forming a habit;
- Making information searchable or discoverable by future-me;
- Reckoning with art;
- Considering an idea properly.
These all involve incorporating, not just experiencing something.
But what kind of system helps us do these reliably? Spaced repetition helps, even beyond learning facts.[1] Sometimes, though, you need other tools.
Here's a general structure for successful ingestions of all sorts:
- Get the right input
- Capture it appropriately
- Surface or discover it at the right time
- Act on it usefully.
I certainly don't have, or know how to make, the perfect ingestion system, but here are some notes on each of the four stages.
1. Get the right input
In one sense, this is the easy part. Much of the reason people use "quick capture" systems, learning systems, "save for later" tools, and countless others is that they think they're encoutering more than they're using. From this perspective, the problem is, already, that we're getting too many good inputs.
In another sense, though, we could all do better here. I know I'm not consuming all and only the best of what's available. When I read about artists, I'm struck at how hard they tend to work to expose themselves to high-quality stimuli. Many people with lots of opportunity and talent pay high opportunity costs to live in academia, at least in part for the access to the right kinds of stimuli.[2]
So, I don't have much to say here, but (i) we can all do better and (ii) please share any cool stories you know about what people do to improve what they experience.
2. Capture it appropriately
This part is a lot harder!
My most contrarian view here is that "quick capture" is overrated. I, at least, don't get value from notes that don't take some real effort to write. There are exceptions: grocery list additions, straightforward bug reports, and so on just don't need much context. I can read a note that says "black beans" or "uploader breaks on large PDFs" and benefit from it. But when I've thought "aha, here's a nontrivial idea, better get it down quick," and proceed to get it down quick, I almost never benefit from having the record of that idea.
There are at least two reasons for this:
- Things seem especially compelling when I'm experiencing them. (Especially my own thoughts!) So the thing I'm trying to capture is, on average, less valuable than I think it is as I'm capturing it.
- The context of the idea ("that which is scarce"!) is more of its value than we tend to remember. So, when we distill an idea to a note in the moment, without its context, we underrate how much of that idea we lose.
I suspect that the quest to find a way to capture ideas without "breaking context" is, in general, impossible. To be a good idea-capturer, you should take fewer notes but make them more detailed.
I won't suggest particular tools here. There are many tools with many devotees, and many people arguing about their merits, and I can't add productively to these debates here. Also, in light of the above, I think many of those people are trying to use those tools for purposes I'm skeptical about.
All that said: tool pluralism is probably underrated. I send myself email, use Drafts, save bookmarks in my browser, use bug trackers, and more. Using fewer tools would bring big penalties and few benefits.
(I'm a tool pluralist more broadly--for example, I use more different text editors than most software engineers. But that's another post.)
3. Surface or discover it at the right time
The main distinction at this stage is between tools that push things back to you and tools you have to pull from. Getting a time-based (Apple) Reminder that pops up on your phone and makes noise is a push reminder; checking your spam folder is a pull-based process.
For ingestion, I am a pushing pessimist and a pulling optimist. Only rarely is it useful for your tool to push content you've saved back to you if your goal is to really incorporate that content. "Pulling" it, however, in time you dedicate to processing what you've said, is often quite useful.
I prefer the pull model for a few reasons:
- Pushing is hard to get right. Even cases that seem clearly good for pushing ("remind me to drop off the letter in the glove box the next time I'm at the post office") don't work quite well enough to rely on. (Really, how many people do you know who use location-based reminders, on Apple's native Reminders or in any other app? And if that's not working for people, aren't the harder cases quite a long ways off?)
- Even if the push works exactly as planned, it's only as good as the plan. Especially if you're time-constrained when you're capturing something, it's often hard to predict when you'll want to see it next. This gets back to the distinction between experiencing and ingesting: the latter tends to require a certain frame of mind and reservoir of energy. It's hard to predict when that will be available.
- Dedicated processing time, by contrast, is (I find) efficient and joyful. This can be either scheduled (a Sunday-evening ritual) or unscheduled ("hey, my train is broken down, let's go through my captures").
A common failure mode here is to (implicitly or explicitly) choose more stimulation over processing. The solution here will vary a lot from person to person, but:
- Delete liberally. It's OK to revise your past self's judgment that something is worth devoting future time to. It's a healthy equilibrium: a very curious and eager current self, combined with a discerning, more protective future self.
- Try to avoid "good intentions piles" at this stage. The time for indistinct good intentions is when you're capturing. By the time you're processing, try to have a concrete plan for what you keep. This could be a fleshed-out recipe and a plan on when to cook it, an activity to try with a to-do item on your list, or similar.
- Another advantage of the "pull model" is that it helps avoid the failure mode where raw captures pile up, by making processing more pleasant. Or, at least, I think it's more pleasant to sit down with my various captured items than to have them pushed back at me at various times.
4. Act on it usefully.
As with (1), there's not a lot to say here: it depends who you are and what you're doing. Good luck!
[1] Probably more than you expect. Here, for example, is Alexey Guzey on how to train yourself by piggybacking on your spaced-repetition habit. I've also benefited from learning facts about art, or adjacent to new ideas, in order to think about them more fluently.
[2] I think this is uncontroversial, but here is Benjamin Moser discussing (among many other things!) how Camille Paglia thought she had to stay in the academy to have the right kind of stimuli.