Highlight 10-20% of bolded passages on subsequent revisits — this second compression layer targets your active needs, not generic importance

Why This Is a Rule

Layer 2 (bold) captures the note's core ideas in a context-independent way — what's important about this note in general. Layer 3 (highlight within bold) adds a context-dependent filter: what's important about this note for my current purpose. A note about negotiation tactics might have 8 bold passages covering different techniques. When you're preparing for a salary negotiation, you highlight the 2 bold passages most relevant to that specific context.

This context-dependence is what makes Layer 3 different from Layer 2. Bold is applied once and persists; highlights are applied on each revisit based on current needs and may change over time. The highlight represents the intersection of the note's content and your current purpose — a dynamic, purpose-specific filter on top of the static, content-specific bold layer.

The compression compounds across layers: original text → 10-20% bold → 10-20% of that highlighted = 1-4% of original text. A 1,000-word note becomes 100-200 words of bold becomes 10-40 words of highlight. At the highlight layer, you can evaluate a note's relevance to your current purpose in under 10 seconds. Across 20 search results, this saves 20-30 minutes compared to full-text evaluation.

When This Fires

• On second or subsequent revisits to a note that already has Layer 2 (bold) applied
• When you're gathering material for a specific project and need to identify the most relevant parts of existing notes
• When Evaluate search results by reading only the bolded/highlighted passages from progressive summarization — skip full-text scanning's search evaluation reveals notes that are generally relevant but need purpose-specific filtering
• Complements Bold 10-20% of a note's text on first revisit — select only core-idea passages, making future scans 5-10x faster (Layer 2: bold) with the purpose-specific distillation

Common Failure Mode

Highlighting everything that's bold: "I bolded it because it was important, so of course I should highlight it." This collapses Layers 2 and 3 into a single layer, losing the purpose-specific filtering. The highlight must be more selective than the bold — it answers "What's important for this specific purpose?" not "What's important in general?"

The Protocol

(1) On revisiting a note with bold passages for a specific purpose, scan only the bold text (not the full note). (2) Highlight the 10-20% of bold text most relevant to your current purpose. (3) The highlight is purpose-dependent: different purposes may highlight different bold passages. It's okay for highlights to shift between revisits. (4) After highlighting, the note has three visible layers: full text (context), bold (general importance), and highlight (purpose-specific relevance). Future scans can start at the highlight level and expand to bold or full text only if needed. (5) If the same passages are highlighted across multiple different purposes, they're the note's most universally valuable content — candidates for the executive summary (Write a 3-5 sentence executive summary at the top of a note only after 3-4 revisits — proven importance earns the investment).