I’m a big fan of tools that can help generate summaries for me, such as Blinkist or Shortform, but I also recognize that those can create problems. Summaries are shortcuts, and shortcuts by nature omit information.
I had another recent situation where this came up; my research was mostly helpful for me, but the summaries that I provided were still of some value to others.
In this case, it was for a recent event that we held. It required paid registration, so we know the exact people that signed up and were attending the event. There were about 30 people coming, and I only knew 5 of them, so I thought it’d be helpful to try to memorize most of their names before the event (using Anki and some other techniques).
Photos
To do that, I collected photos of everyone from their LinkedIn profiles. I spent a bit of time looking each person up, reading about what they did, and then putting their photo in a folder for later use. I put those photos in Anki, but also shared the folder with the other event organizers so that they could work on them if they wanted as well.
I did the research and got a bit more out of it, but since the main goal was simply to match names to faces, we all essentially accomplished the same thing.
The balance between research and summaries will always be a tricky one, and I enjoy working to find that balance.
I love that you wrestle with that balance, and then are nice enough to share it with the rest of us. In that way, at least for some things, you save me one step! 🙂
I enjoy the wrestling, which really helps. 🙂 I’m glad you find value in it as well!