Part 3 of a 3-part series. Part 1: Here· Part 2: Here
This is the final part of the series. Part 1 covered CODE (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express) — what to do with information. Part 2 covered PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive) — where it lives. This one covers the piece that ties it together: connecting AI to your note-taking app, where it truly becomes your second brain.
A quick word on tools. My note-taking app is Notion — if you haven’t run into it, think of it as a notes app with databases built in. I’ll use it as my example throughout, but the concept works with whatever app you use; most major note-taking tools are adding AI connections. Notion connects directly to AI tools — I have all of my AI tools wired into it, and they can read and write my notes natively. That connection changes everything about how useful both sides become.
Better answers, automatically. When your AI can read your notes and histories, it already knows what you’re working on. Ask it a question about a project and it has the historical information — the decisions you made, the notes you captured, the context you’d otherwise have to re-explain every single time. The answers get better because it isn’t starting from zero.
A second brain for your AI tools. I store my notes and conversations from multiple AI platforms in Notion — Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot all connect to it. So when I’m working in Claude, it knows everything the others have already given me, because it all lives in one place. It’s not just a second brain for me — it’s a second brain for my AI tools, and they learn from each other. I even backfilled a year of past conversations so none of that history is stranded.
AI supercharges every letter of CODE. Here’s where it gets fun — Forte designed CODE and PARA to not be AI-dependent, but with AI, the first three letters happen automatically. I capture something once, and the AI takes it from there — organizing it and distilling it without me touching it:
- Capture — A free browser extension called Save to Notion grabs any web page, as a link or as the full page, and drops it straight into my Notion inbox. Email works too: from any of my inboxes, personal or work, I just forward a message I want logged. And meetings are captured as well. If it’s an online meeting, my meeting tool automatically captures the transcription; if it’s in person, I record it on my iPhone. Either way, every meeting I attend gets captured with the notes, a summary, and the to-dos that came out of it.
- Organize — Whatever comes in — a transcript, a forwarded email, a web clip — the AI reads it and automatically files it to the right project or area in PARA. I’m not sorting; the AI is.
- Distill — This is the part that surprised me. I thought I was just capturing full transcriptions, but the AI was automatically distilling them at the same time — summarizing each one and highlighting the parts that matter, based on the project and everything else it knows. The same thing happens when I’m working through a problem with AI, which is all the time: I say “log it,” and the conversation is saved already distilled — a bulleted summary and the decisions we made, with the full conversation attached if I ever need it. What gets stored is already the distilled version. No going back to do it later.
- Express — When I want to write an article, research a decision I’m facing, or work on a project, I point the AI at that area in Notion. It reads through everything there and helps me produce from it. The first draft is already half-written before I show up.
AI independence. This is the one people overlook. Every AI platform wants to be your memory — and if you let one of them, you’re locked in. Because everything I capture lives in Notion, not inside any one AI’s walls, my tools are portable. Whenever a better model comes out or I want to switch, my knowledge comes with me — switching costs me nothing. But the bigger win is day to day: no single AI is best at everything, so I pick whichever one is best for the task at hand, and it already knows what I’ve worked on with all the others.
One bonus tool. It’s not part of CODE or PARA, but it makes all of this dramatically faster: Wispr Flow. It’s talk-to-text on steroids. I rarely type anymore — I can talk far faster than I can type, and it automatically reformats as I go. If I get interrupted, misspeak, or correct myself mid-sentence, it doesn’t transcribe the mess verbatim; it writes it the way I meant it to come out. Every email, every Teams post, every web search — almost everything I used to type, I now dictate.
Put the three parts together: CODE tells me what to do with information; PARA tells me where it lives and how it’s organized; and AI runs the machinery — capturing, filing, distilling, and helping me express. Nothing I capture is wasted, nothing I need is buried, and everything — every note, meeting, decision, and conversation — shows up exactly when I need it. That’s not a filing system. That’s a second brain.
Hopefully these 2 cents bring a strong ROI for you.