Writing is hard and writing a summary is no exception. If you are working on proposals, general research or strategies, at some point you have to summarize your idea. As Pascal once said “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” A summary takes time to get right.
The investment does pay off as it makes your work easier to digest, improves structure and highlights your very best insights. It’s not uncommon that only the summary gets read. That’s actually a good thing. But it raises the stakes to get the summary right and you still need to put in the work – your summary will only be as good as the underlying work. But there are a few tips and tricks that helped me in the past.
I remember distinctly when I got my very first email address. It was a mid-nineties summer in Germany and I finally got my hands on a modem. That was a big deal, as it required me sending a cashier’s check via mail to a business that I didn’t know, wait for seven or eight weeks with no status update to receive a no-name modem with at best spotty documentation. After dabbling in local BBSes and QWK readers, I signed up for a BBS that was connected to Fidonet which meant that my online community was no longer restricted to the local area code. Fidonet provided access to a global network of nodes that replicated messages with each other via dial up. Because of dial up messages were replicated between nodes only a few times per day. Therefore it could take days for messages to travel from sender to recipient, but this was a global network.
Part of that deal was an email address. Admittedly, one that took days to deliver, but one that allowed me to communicate with people on the other side of the world without long distance calls. That left an immense impression on me and I remember going outside to tell the great news to my father who was working in the garden. After all it was summer. I told him about how it was all connected and that I could send emails to people in places like America. He just looked at me, baffled, and just commented that I didn’t know anybody in the US. He was right, but that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that my English was broken or that my email address was a lengthy and random assortment or letters and numbers. What mattered was the possibility.
Such a great podcast episode about a song that seems to have vanished from the internet. Totally amazed by the lengths to which the team has gone to solve the mystery:
A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet. PJ takes on the Super Tech Support case.
OneNote is one of those underappreciated apps within Office 365. To be honest, I’ve only used it for the last two years despite my wife having praised it for her work as a teacher for a long time. But it really has grown on me and I enjoy taking notes, working on outlines and reviewing documents with OneNote. Its integration with Teams makes it a no-brainer to share notes among a project team.
I recently saw an unanswered tweet asking for help about OneNote and thought this might be an opportunity to share some of the things that I’ve learned to appreciate about OneNote over the last two years.
