Part 1 of a 3-part series. View part 2 here, view part 3 here.
We all suffer from TMI — too much information — in business and in life. At this point in my career I’m learning more, in more new areas and disciplines, than I ever have, so my need to capture and organize information has never been greater.
Searching for a methodology, I came across Tiago Forte and his book Building a Second Brain. His models fit the way I absorb and organize information, and they let me upgrade my previous systems — which were all TLAs, three-letter acronyms. Forte’s are all four-letter acronyms, which must mean they’re better by at least one letter.
In this three-part series, I will cover CODE, then PARA, then connecting both of them with AI for more automation and efficiency.
The first model is CODE: Capture, Organize, Distill, Express.
Capture — Get ideas out of your head and into a tool as fast as possible, without judging them or doing anything with them yet. Any note-taking app works — whatever you’ll actually use.
Organize — File information by actionability: project, ongoing area, or reference. This is a whole model of its own (another four-letter acronym), so I’ll save it for the next post.
Those two we all sort of know. The two that hooked me are the last two, because they answer the question I could never answer before: I have all these notes — what do I actually do with them?
Distill — A note should get more valuable every time you touch it. Forte calls it progressive summarization:
- First visit — capture the note.
- Second visit — bold the passages that matter.
- Third visit — highlight the parts of the bold that matter most.
- Fourth visit (rare) — write a short summary at the top so you can skip the body entirely.
Later, review is instant — your eyes go straight to the bold and highlights.
One critical rule: revisit notes for a reason, not for homework. The reason you came back tells you what to bold. And notes you never revisit never get distilled, so capturing costs you nothing.
In the third installment of this series, I will show you how I use AI to automate distilling my notes.
Express — Knowledge you don’t use is dead weight. The point isn’t a tidy archive; it’s producing things faster. Think about how much of your work is something you’ve already done before: an email you’ve written five times, a proposal that’s 80% like the last one, an answer you gave a customer last month, a checklist you rebuilt from memory. Express means saving those finished pieces and pulling them back out instead of recreating them. Whatever you’re producing — an email, a quote, a presentation, a decision — you start from something, not nothing. That’s the whole payoff of capturing in the first place.
The O in CODE — Organize — is one of the most valuable parts, and it’s what I cover in depth in part 2: [LINK TO PART 2]. It’s the next four-letter acronym, PARA, and it stands for:
- Projects
- Areas
- Resources
- Archive
Same guy, another four letters, another one-letter improvement over everything I used before. And after that, the third installment: connecting AI to a note taking app so it truly becomes your second brain: [LINK TO PART 3].
Hopefully these 2 cents bring a strong ROI for you.