Distill

Category: workflow step

Summary: The act of extracting the most useful meaning from notes and sources.

What it means

Distillation turns raw material into usable insight. It may involve summaries, highlights, bolded key points, outlines, or rewritten notes.

How it shows up in personal knowledge management

Distill connects to progressive-summarization, source-notes, literature-notes, synthesis, and permanent-notes. It is what prevents capture from becoming clutter.

Common mistakes

• Highlighting too much.
• Summarizing without deciding why the source matters.

Related pages

• progressive-summarization
• source-notes
• literature-notes
• synthesis
• permanent-notes