Field Report #9: Excerpting Instead of Processing

• Feb 19th, 2025
• by Sascha

When I processed Transcend by Kaufman¹, I encountered the following problems:

1. Lack of authority: The book is not a book for me whose structure I want to follow. It is not valuable to me as a whole, but only as a collection of parts.
2. Lack of relevance: My motivation to process the book deeply is low because I get the impression that processing the book will neither advance existing projects nor generate new interesting (writing) projects. I also don’t have the impression that I’m learning anything for myself.
3. Lack of beauty: I don’t see that the book gives me a particular aesthetic of self-development. I do not feel inspired by its view.
4. Lack of usefulness: In processing the book, I realize that I don’t capture many thoughts or generate deep insights. I was able to generate the best knowledge when I processed the references myself.

Originally, I thought that I could use the processing of the book as an opportunity to deepen the material in my Zettelkasten on Maslow and connect it to current research. But my first impression was wrong.

Normally, as I process the book, I develop a certain sense of coherence throughout the book, even if I don’t agree with the author on all points. In this case, I don’t have that feeling of coherence.

The book is neither a reason to change my previous goals (e.g. to approach a writing project differently or to live differently), nor to develop new goals (e.g. to create new writing projects). At the same time, processing doesn’t help me move forward with my current goals.

From here, I have two options:

1. I ask myself if I can produce something with a different way of working that is a good vehicle for my goals.
2. I put the book aside and move on to other work.

I have chosen the first option. Normally I process the books directly in the Zettelkasten. Instead, I create a sloppy excerpt.

1. Instead of The Archive I use TaskPaper (as my Zettelkasten Rumen). This way I can copy the excerpt directly into my system for storing preliminary products. I manage this system with TaskPaper. So I process the book outside my Zettelkasten. After all, I’m not creating atomic thoughts, but preliminary products for them.
2. I don’t process any sources when working on the book, but only check them for their possible quality. A paragraph by Kaufman is sometimes only an occasion for me to write down a sentence about the statement of the paragraph and then look for links to the sources he has given.
3. I greatly reduce my thoroughness Marking the text has a lower probability of producing good knowledge when I process the marked text. Therefore, I am less thorough in my processing in order to progress much faster.

So instead of carefully creating individual notes, I create a large excerpt. This allows me to work through the book much faster. I record what is obviously valuable. Later, I will process this excerpt.

So I use another filter to spend more time producing good knowledge. In this case, I’ve decided that processing the book thoroughly is not a good way to pursue my goals. However, it’s also not rational to change my goals or define new ones. So I’m changing my ways to better pursue my goals. I create an excerpt that then serves as the very tool I hoped the book would be.

I have added some parts of the excerpt to various projects. However, I have filed the majority of the excerpt under the heading “Maslow” in the chapter “Cartography of Life” in my book project “Self-Development”. If I decide to work on this chapter, I will immediately have material with this excerpt to start the preparatory work.

An important lesson I want to convey with this article is that every workflow should be understood as a tool in your repertoire. All too often there is a misconception that the most important thing is to find “your own way of working”. I reduce my contemporary critique to the following: I consider it another manifestation of the modern and exceedingly narcissistic belief that one’s ego is the most important thing in life. The practical problem is that by defining your own personal way of working, you also define which problems you can and cannot deal with. The conviction that you have a way of working that is best for you turns the challenge of modern knowledge work on its head: the problems do not cater to us. We have to adapt to the problem.

My own way of working is based on over a decade of practice and intensive study of processing methods. The danger is that when faced with the problems described above, instead of questioning myself, I hold on to my maladaptive self and solve the problem at hand in an unproductive way. Instead of working on an excerpt that will later help me prepare important parts of my book on self-development, I would have put the book aside and had a poor opinion of the book at best. I would have filed it under “interesting to read, but not suitable for deeper study”. I might even have associated my disappointment with the book and would not recommend it at all, even though it is a good read for people who know Maslow through Wikipedia at best. It’s like Viktor Frankl said:

What is needed here is a turn in the whole question of the meaning of life: we must learn and teach despairing people that it never really matters what we expect from life, rather merely: what life expects from us![117][#viktor2018]

Thank goodness we don’t have to worry about the big question right away, but can reduce it to the problem of knowledge work:

We need to learn that what really matters is not how we want to work, but what processing the source requires.

The larger our repertoire and – perhaps even more importantly – how well we are practiced with this repertoire, the more value-adding we can work with sources.

What do I do with the book?

You haven’t thoroughly and completely procssed the book. Are you saving it for later?

No. The mining principle applies.

A common question in relation to the interleaving of books (and other sources) is how to keep the sources once you have worked on them. People are often surprised when I say that I don’t keep any sources.

It’s a straightforward calculation:

On the first pass, I extracted most of the for ideas from the text. The text resembles a largely exhausted mine. A new text would be a largely untouched mine. This means that processing a new text is more likely to lead to a productive session than working through an old text again.

Processing texts is not an end, but only a means to generate the most productive sessions possible. I therefore measure my productivity not by how many texts I can process or how thoroughly, but by the quality and quantity of thoughts unfolded, the quality and quantity of ideas understood.

There are, of course, exceptions, such as the Bible or Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”. They have such great depth that it would be unrealistic to have explored them in one go.

But I don’t need to keep a study comparing two endurance training protocols.

This saves me from having to develop a systematic filing system for PDFs and the like.