Bold 10-20% of a note's text on first revisit — select…

When This Fires

• On first revisit to any captured note in your system
• When a note you captured months ago becomes relevant to current work
• When Evaluate search results by reading only…'s search results show a note you need to evaluate
• Complements Highlight 10-20% of bolded passages on subsequent revisits… (Layer 3: highlighting) and Write a 3-5 sentence executive summary at the top… (Layer 4: executive summary) as the first distillation pass

Common Failure Mode

Bolding everything that "seems important" — usually 40-60% of the text. This produces notes where most of the text is bold, providing zero acceleration for future scanning. The discipline is in the 10-20% constraint: if you've bolded more than 20%, go back and un-bold the least essential passages until you're within range.

The Protocol

(1) When you revisit a note for a specific purpose, read through the note and bold the passages that capture core ideas, key claims, surprising insights, and actionable takeaways. (2) Target 10-20% of the text. After bolding, visually check: does the bold text form a readable summary of the note's main points? Can you get the gist of the note by reading only the bold? (3) Do not bold examples, transitions, or supporting evidence unless they're more valuable than the claims they support. (4) The bold should survive extraction: if you pulled only the bold passages into a new document, would it make sense? (5) This is a one-time operation per note. Once Layer 2 is applied, future revisits use it (Evaluate search results by reading only…) rather than re-bolding.