• 30 Nov, 2025 *

I think of a category of intellectual activity in terms of ingestion. The canonical example of this is learning something: I encounter information, structure it as flashcards, put the flashcards in my spaced repetition system, and learn it forever.

Sometimes, though, what I’m after isn’t learning facts. Ingestion also includes:

• Trying something I want to try;
• Forming a habit;
• Making information searchable or discoverable by future-me;
• Reckoning with art;
• Considering an idea properly.

A robust spaced repetition system helps with these.[1] Sometimes, though, you need other tools.

Here’s a general structure for successful ingestions of all sorts:

1. Get the right input
2. Capture it appropriately
3. Surface or discover it at the right time
4. Act on it usefully.

I certainly don’t have, or know how to make, the perfect ingestion system, but here are some notes on each of the four stages.

1. Get the right input

In one sense, this is the easy part: people want ingestion systems–or "quick capture" systems, or learning systems, or "save for later" tools, and so on–because they find themselves encoutering more than they’re using.

In another sense, though, we could all do better here. Surely I am not consuming all and only the best things I could be consuming. When I read about artists, I’m struck at the effort many of them make to expose themselves to new, high-quality stimuli. Many enormously skilled people, with tons of opportunities, pay very high opportunity costs to live in academia, at least in part for the access to the right kinds of stimuli.[2]

So, I don’t have much to say here, but (i) we can all do better and (ii) please share any cool stories you know about what people do to improve what they experience.

2. Capture it appropriately

This part is a lot harder!

I’m skeptical that "quick capture" systems are the best tools here–or, at least, I think that the quickness of quick capture is overrated. I’ve almost never gotten value from a nontrivial note that I didn’t give some thought to as I was writing it. This doesn’t count grocery list additions, straightforward bug reports, and the like: some things just don’t need much context. But when I’ve thought "aha, here’s an idea, better get it down quick," I don’t think I’ve ever later benefited from having a record of that idea.

There are at least two reasons for this:

1. Stimuli, especially ideas I think up, seem especially compelling when I’m experiencing them. So the thing I’m trying to capture is, on average, less valuable than I think it is as I’m capturing it.
2. The context of the idea ("that which is scarce"!) is more of its value than we tend to remember. Conversely, when we distill an idea to a note in the moment, we underrate how much of that idea we lose.

So, I suspect that to be a good idea-capturer, you should take fewer notes but make them more detailed.

I won’t suggest particular tools here, both because it’s a big and controversial subject and because I (in light of the above) think that the traditional ways of evaluating them are not the best. I suspect, however, that tool pluralism is probably correct here. I send myself email, use Drafts, save bookmarks in my browser, and more. Using fewer tools would bring big penalties and few benefits.

(I’m a tool pluralist more broadly–for example, I use more different text editors than most software engineers. But that’s another post.)

3. Surface or discover it at the right time

I am a pushing pessimist and a pulling optimist: only in the most clear-cut cases is it useful for your tool to push content you’ve saved back to you. But "pulling" it, in time you dedicate to processing what you’ve said, is often quite useful.

I prefer the pull model for a few reasons:

1. Pushing is hard to get right. Even cases that seem clearly good for pushing ("remind me to drop off the letter in the glove box the next time I’m at the post office") don’t work quite well enough to rely on. (Really, how many people do you know who use location-based reminders, on Apple’s native Reminders or in any other app? And if that’s not working for people, aren’t the harder cases quite a long ways off?)
2. Even if the push works exactly as planned, it’s only as good as the plan. Especially if you’re time-constrained when you’re capturing something, it’s often hard to predict when you’ll want to see it next.
3. Dedicated processing time, by contrast, is (I find) efficient and joyful. This can be either scheduled (a Sunday-evening ritual) or unscheduled ("hey, my train is broken down, let’s go through my captures").

A common failure mode here is to (implicitly or explicitly) choose more stimulation over processing. The solution here will vary a lot from person to person, but:

1. Delete liberally. It’s OK to revise your past self’s judgment that something is worth devoting future time to. It’s a healthy equilibrium: a very curious and eager current self, combined with a discerning, more protective future self.
2. Try to avoid "good intentions piles" at this stage. The time for indistinct good intentions is when you’re capturing: in processing, try to have a concrete plan for what you keep. This could be a fleshed-out recipe and a plan on when to cook it, an activity to try with a to-do item on your list, or similar.
3. Another advantage of the "pull model" is that it helps avoid this failure mode, by making this stage more pleasant. Or, at least, I think it’s more pleasant to sit down with my various captured items than to have them pushed back at me at various times.

4. Act on it usefully.

Good luck!

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[1] Probably more than you expect. Here, for example, is Alexey Guzey on how to train yourself by piggybacking on your spaced-repetition habit. I’ve also benefited from learning facts about art, or adjacent to new ideas, in order to think about them more fluently.

[2] I think this is uncontroversial, but here is Benjamin Moser discussing (among many other things!) how Camille Paglia thought she had to stay in the academy to have the right kind of stimuli.