Summary-Maps

What are summary maps?

Summaries and mind maps are two of the most underrated tools for learning and working. Most people don't use either and rely on the diagrams in their notes to understand the content. However, there are some significant advantages to incorporating them into your daily routine.

Summarizing something is a way to test your knowledge. You put it into your own words and filter out only what's truly important. This gives you a better understanding of the content. At the same time, you have a short version of a long text, saving you a lot of time when you need to reread everything.

Mind maps, on the other hand, help you get an overview. They show the key terms of the topic and their relationships. This allows you to visually represent the general structure and understand it much more intuitively.

Both of these methods take extra time, and if you don't apply them correctly, there's no guarantee you'll understand anything better afterward. That's why they're often deliberately omitted from learning strategies.

We spent a lot of time processing information from books and texts in a variety of ways. We experimented for months to find the right technique, but the big breakthrough came when we combined summaries and mind maps on the topics. This allowed us to achieve the perfect blend of presenting the content of a source and showing the connections between the individual points. We call this technique "summary maps" .

Summary maps are summaries of sources presented as tables and images. They are a hybrid of a summary and a mind map of a source's content. This allows you to gain a bird's-eye view of a source and better memorize the content. This approach automatically gives you an overview of all the content, allowing you to present it both generally at a glance and in detail, while also saving time.

The problem with typical summaries

A summary is generally a compilation of the most important content of a source. It presents the essential statements in a shortened, but meaningful, form.

Most summaries are simply a compilation of key information from the source. They reflect the structure of the source and are often presented as a series of bullet points or block summaries. This results in a very linear structure, almost like a list of contents: "First this, then that, then that..." While this facilitates understanding the points and reflects the reader's experience of the source, it makes it difficult to maintain an overview.

The following image shows an online summary of the book " Building a Second Brain " by Tiago Forte. Although the summary is very short and well-written, the page cannot be zoomed out far enough to fit the entire summary on one page. This makes it difficult to get a mental picture of the content. The effort to visualize it and understand the structure still lies with the reader. If you want an overview of the concepts, to truly grasp them, then you still need to read the entire text and think about them yourself.

The solution

Here is another example of a summary of the same book by Otio . It lists the book's main method, the CODE method. This presentation makes it somewhat clearer, but it only shows a small part of the book and not how this method relates to the rest of the book.

In such summaries, the content of the source is clearly reproduced, but the structure and the relationships between the concepts are only indirectly conveyed. For example, Tiago Forte describes two core methods in his book: the "CODE method," which he uses to process information, and the "PARA method," which he uses to organize that information. PARA appears in the chapter "Organize" in the book and is thus part of the "O" in CODE. Such relationships are difficult to describe in just a few words and are therefore omitted from most summaries.

Mind maps, on the other hand, are very well suited to illustrating such relationships. They show the individual concepts from a bird's-eye view, reveal connections, and thus clarify the structure. This allows you to see at a glance which concepts are involved and how they relate to each other.

The goal of a summary map is to combine these two types of summaries. This allows you to clearly present both the structure and the content. Within a summary, you rarely have enough space to note everything in a huge mind map. In this case, it's sufficient to list the information in tabular form, as shown in the following image.

Here you can clearly see both methods listed and understand at a glance that "PARA" is a sub-method of "CODE" and that both consist of four principles. This not only allows you to visualize the structure but also to present the information directly in the image. The entire "CODE Method" with all notes is shown in the following summary map:

By presenting the information this way, you get both an overview of the entire system and detailed information on each individual point, all in one image. You can zoom in and out as needed. You can find an example of the complete summary map for "Building a Second Brain" on our website at [LINK ].

Creating a Summary Map

The information in a source can be presented using four tools: definitions, lists, tables, and graphs. These tools allow you to easily clarify all the information from the source.

To create a summary map, first open a sheet in your preferred note-taking system. Then write down the background information, such as the title and author of the source, along with a general summary of one to two sentences about the source's content.

Next, compile the main topics, chapters, and principles from the source. Present them in a table. Pay attention to the structure of the topics and subtopics. Then, fill the table with the corresponding definitions and explanations for each principle. Gather further explanations, arguments, and additional information, and compile them into lists at the appropriate points in the table. Copy individual graphics from the source or create your own to illustrate more complex relationships.

A good example of how the tools work together is Chapter 8 in "Building a Second Brain." There, Tiago Forte describes the concept of convergence and divergence in creative work. He distinguishes them as two types of work and suggests keeping them fundamentally separate. Divergence is the process of gathering new ideas and inspiration. Convergence is the process of sorting through ideas, eliminating possibilities, and making decisions. He contrasts these two terms and offers tips on what to do in each phase. He then places the concept within the context of the CODE method, in the form of a graphic.

Not all information is equally important. There will be some larger chapters that are less important. The more important a chapter is, the more points you should note for it. This way, you can see how important a chapter is based on the number of points. If you don't make any marks or notes for some chapters, at least list the main chapter title. List the less important chapters or summarize them in one sentence. This way, you can find them again if you ever need to look up the information.

In " How to Read a Book, " for example, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren describe their approach to reading books. In Part 3, they describe various approaches they use to read different types of literature. They outline methods for reading fiction, practical, mathematical, historical, and social science literature. Not every chapter will be of interest to everyone. Knowing that it exists is enough.

Get an overview of everything important and present it in a way that you can understand. Note down the most important information in short bullet points.

For an entire book, your summary should contain a maximum of 1000 to 2000 words. This allows you to flexibly either review dozens of sources per hour or immediately identify the relevant chapter within a source and read it, depending on your current needs.

Templates for summaries of individual sources and summaries of books on learning, productivity and success can be found on our website at [ LINK ].

Analyzing a source this way takes about three times as long as reading it once. After all, you first have to read and highlight it, then go through it again, summarize the information, and understand it. This might seem like a lot of work, but compared to conventional methods, you save a considerable amount of time. You only have to read the text completely once. If you place your highlights correctly, you'll save even more time on the second reading.

At the same time, this approach forces you to understand the content. Whether you do it in a summary map or "freehand" in your head, the steps to understanding the source are the same. You organize the information in your mind and summarize it in your own words. Only then have you truly understood it. Presenting it in the form of a table is simply a tool that facilitates your thinking process.

Furthermore, this allows you to capture the image in your mind. You'll see gaps much more quickly and memorize them more easily. This also saves you the effort of translating it back into your own thoughts each time you review the material. In this format, you can access the information very quickly at any time, and it's immediately processed for you.

Summary maps on Leeway-Metod.de

In addition to the summaries, each book on the website also has a downloadable summary map of its content. A link to this can be found below the book description.