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. My need to capture and organize different kinds of information has never been greater.
Searching for a methodology, I came across Tiago Forte and his book Building a Second Brain (BASB). 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.
Inside BASB are two models: CODE, which covers what you do with information, and PARA, which covers where you put it and how it’s organized. And then there’s a third piece Forte didn’t design: connecting AI to all of it, which is where the system really comes alive.
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: Apple Notes, OneNote, Notion, whatever you’ll actually use.
Organize — File information by actionability, not by topic. That’s the PARA model, covered below.
Capturing and organizing we all sort of know. The two steps that hooked me are the last two, because they answer the question I could never answer before: I have all these notes — do I ever review them? What do I actually do with them?
Distill
Distilling means a note gets more valuable every time you touch it, instead of sitting static. Forte calls it progressive summarization:
- First visit — capture the note itself.
- Second visit — bold the passages that matter.
- Third visit — highlight the parts of the bold that matter most.
- Fourth visit (rare, only for notes you use constantly) — 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, because you’ve already whittled the note down to what you need.
One critical rule: revisit notes for a reason, not for homework. The reason you came back is exactly what tells you what to bold. If you’re just reviewing on a schedule, you have no way to know what’s important. And notes you never revisit never get distilled — so capturing costs you nothing.
Express
Knowledge you don’t use is dead weight. The point of all this isn’t a tidy archive — it’s producing things faster and better.
The mechanism that makes this work for me is intermediate packets: breaking work into smaller reusable components — a template, a checklist, a script, a set of talking points — and saving them. When a new project starts, I pull every related packet into it before I write a single new word. I never start from scratch. I always start from existing information, and everything goes faster.
PARA: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive
PARA answers the question every note-taking system eventually faces: where does this go? Most of us organize by topic, like a library. Forte organizes by actionability — how soon and how likely you are to need it. Just four folders:
Projects — Things with a goal and a deadline. A project ends. If it can’t end, it’s not a project. This folder should be short, current, and reviewed constantly, because it’s where your actual work lives.
Areas — Ongoing responsibilities with a standard to maintain but no finish line: your team, your health, your finances, a role you own. Projects come and go; areas persist.
Resources — Topics you’re interested in and reference material you’re collecting. No commitment attached — it’s the “might be useful someday” shelf, and that’s fine, because it costs nothing sitting there.
Archive — Anything inactive from the other three. Finished projects, areas you no longer own, interests that faded. You don’t delete it — you move it out of sight. If it becomes relevant again, it moves back.
Two things make PARA work for me:
- Notes move. A resource can jump into a project the moment it becomes useful. A completed project drops into the archive. The system is a flow, not a filing cabinet.
- Actionability beats topic. When I open my notes, the question is never “where did I file that?” It’s “what am I working on?” — and everything for that work is already in one place.
And PARA isn’t just for Notion or OneNote or Apple Notes — it’s for your filing system, period. I’ve moved all my folders into the same PARA structure: OneDrive, Google Drive, and any other app that makes me keep folders. Whether I’m in my notes or hunting for a file, everything is organized the same way, because everything falls under those same four categories.
One more thing. This is a business-oriented post, but probably half of what’s in my system is personal. A lot of my areas are family and friends. A project might be a vacation. My resources are recipes and things that feed areas like Cooking or Health. That’s the other beauty of CODE and PARA: I used to run one system for work and another for personal. Now my work and personal priorities, projects, and notes all live in a single place.
Connecting AI: making your second brain work for your AI
Notion connects directly to AI tools — I have Claude wired into mine, and it can read and write my workspace natively. That one connection changes everything about how useful both sides become.
Better answers, automatically. When your AI can read your histories in Notion, 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, Gemini, all of it. So when I’m working in Claude, it knows everything ChatGPT or Gemini has 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 AI makes every step of them more efficient:
- 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.
- Organize — Claude connects to that inbox, reads what came in, and automatically files it to the right project or area in PARA. I’m not sorting; the AI is.
- Distill — Anytime I’m working through a problem with AI — which is all the time — I say “log it.” It doesn’t just save the conversation to Notion; it distills it at the same time: a bulleted summary, the decisions we made, with the full conversation attached if I ever need to reference it. What gets stored is already the distilled version. No going back to do it later.
- Express — When I want to write an article, a blog post, 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.
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.
The payoff
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. Together they mean nothing I capture is wasted, nothing I need is buried, and every project begins with a head start.
Anyway, that is my 2 cents, hopefully it brings you value.