Why 2026 Is the Year to Build a Second Brain (And Why You NEED One)

For 500,000 years, we've had essentially the same cognitive architecture. And today, I want to talk about a leap that we can make, all of us, even non-engineers, can make in 2026 that will help us to build a second brain with AI in a way that's never been possible before. But first, let me set the stage. Why does this matter? Look, a second brain doesn't have to exist because you're lazy. It's not because you don't care. It's fundamentally because your brain was never designed to

be a storage system. Brains are designed to think. And every time you force a brain to remember something, instead of letting it think of something new, you're paying a tax that you don't see. And that tax shows up in real ways. It shows up in relationships that cool off because you forgot what someone told you that mattered to them. It shows up in projects that fail in the same way you predicted at 11:00 p.m. 3 weeks ago, except you forgot to write it down. and

you got to be right and then you still got to suffer the consequences cuz you couldn't prevent it. It shows up in the background hum of constant open loops in your brain. Things you never finished that you are just on the edge of remembering that low-grade anxiety of don't forget to do this running as a thread that you cannot close because you never put that loop anywhere reliable and you can't trust a journaling system to remember. So here's what I want you

to understand about this moment in our history. For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have had roughly the same cognitive architecture. We can hold about four to seven things in working memory. There's a reason why phone numbers are about the length they are. We're terrible at retrieval. We're great at pattern recognition when the patterns are in front of us. And we're really bad at pattern recognition when the patterns are scattered like they so often are at work across six months of

half-remembered conversations. Every productivity system ever invented has been a workaround for our human brain limitations. Writing itself is a workaround. So, filing cabinets, rolodexes, to-do lists, journaling systems, all of it has been an attempt to extend our biological memory into something that is more reliable. But here's what's different about 2026. For the first time in human history, we have access to systems that do not just passively store information, but

half-remembered conversations. Every productivity system ever invented has been a workaround for our human brain limitations. Writing itself is a workaround. So, filing cabinets, rolodexes, to-do lists, journaling systems, all of it has been an attempt to extend our biological memory into something that is more reliable. But here's what's different about 2026. For the first time in human history, we have access to systems that do not just passively store information, but

actively work against that information we give it while we sleep and do other things. Systems that can classify, route, or summarize or surface or nudge without us having to remember to do any of those activities. This is not an incremental improvement. This is an entirely new capability in the history of human cognition. And the most important part is in 2026, you don't have to be an engineer to build a second brain. So let me go through what has actually changed and why this moment

matters. And I think this is the time if you don't have a second brain, it's worth building one. So for years, the promise of a second brain was essentially just, hey, it's better storage. You pick a tool, maybe it's notion, maybe it's Obsidian, maybe it's Rome, maybe it's Evernote, and you capture your notes. Maybe you use AI to summarize, to search, and then nothing. the notes would pile up. You end up having to keep them very organized yourself or you stop trusting them. At

matters. And I think this is the time if you don't have a second brain, it's worth building one. So for years, the promise of a second brain was essentially just, hey, it's better storage. You pick a tool, maybe it's notion, maybe it's Obsidian, maybe it's Rome, maybe it's Evernote, and you capture your notes. Maybe you use AI to summarize, to search, and then nothing. the notes would pile up. You end up having to keep them very organized yourself or you stop trusting them. At

some point, it becomes the company wiki that everyone looks at as a dump of old information. You stop using it and the system dies the death of so many of these storage solutions. I've watched this cycle repeat in personal systems and professional systems for well over a decade. And smart people, really motivated people, people who genuinely want to be organized tend to hit the same wall. The storage systems we have today work for about one in 20 people that I talk to on an ongoing daily

basis. And those people are typically the most organized people I know. So you would think they need it the least, but they're so organized they can make it work for them. For the rest of us, it's a challenge. And the wall is not motivation. The wall is that traditional systems ask us to do cognitive work at exactly the wrong moment. They ask us to decide where a thought belongs when we're walking into a meeting. They ask us to tag it when we're driving. They

basis. And those people are typically the most organized people I know. So you would think they need it the least, but they're so organized they can make it work for them. For the rest of us, it's a challenge. And the wall is not motivation. The wall is that traditional systems ask us to do cognitive work at exactly the wrong moment. They ask us to decide where a thought belongs when we're walking into a meeting. They ask us to tag it when we're driving. They

ask us to name it properly when we're about to go to bed. They ask us to choose a folder in a taxonomy and a structure. And that's the moment when you frankly don't want that. You just want relief. You want someone else to do it. You don't want to organize. You want to capture it and move on. And so most of us do what every normal person does. We take a note somewhere. You stick it in Apple Notes and you tell yourself you'll organize it later, right? And later never comes. You have a pile of

notes you don't trust, which means you stop putting notes in it. and the whole thing collapses. And so what's changed is that we're moving from AI inside your notes as a search tool to AI running a loop. And the difference is enormous. An AI loop means the system does work whether or not you feel motivated today. You capture a thought in 5 seconds. The system classifies it. It routes it to the right place. It extracts the relevant details. It writes it into a

structured database. And then it nudges you every morning with what matters today. Then it reviews your week every Sunday and it tells you what's stuck, what's moving, what you should focus on next. You don't have to remember to use it. It just shows up. That's the shift from building a knowledge base to installing a behavior changing system. The center of gravity moves from you as the person who has to keep all of this on the rails to the loop helping you stay on the rails and stay organized.

structured database. And then it nudges you every morning with what matters today. Then it reviews your week every Sunday and it tells you what's stuck, what's moving, what you should focus on next. You don't have to remember to use it. It just shows up. That's the shift from building a knowledge base to installing a behavior changing system. The center of gravity moves from you as the person who has to keep all of this on the rails to the loop helping you stay on the rails and stay organized.

You get a genuine support structure. Now, this all sounds very theoretical. I am not a hypy person. I am not the person telling you to do this in early 2024 when the tools aren't ready. I want to tell you now exactly what tools make this work today in 2026. The stack I would recommend if you are not an engineer is Slack plus notion plus Zapier plus Claude or Chat JPT. That's it. Four tools all of which you probably already have access to or can get access to in the next 10 minutes. Slack is your

capture point. Almost everyone's in Slack already. You create one private channel just for you called SB Inbox or whatever you want to name it. And that's where you throw every single thought. One message per thought. No organizing, no tagging, no decisions. You type it or you paste it and you hit send. Notion is the storage layer. You create four simple databases. People, projects, ideas, and admin. Each one has a handful of field that the system is going to fill in automatically. like the date

capture point. Almost everyone's in Slack already. You create one private channel just for you called SB Inbox or whatever you want to name it. And that's where you throw every single thought. One message per thought. No organizing, no tagging, no decisions. You type it or you paste it and you hit send. Notion is the storage layer. You create four simple databases. People, projects, ideas, and admin. Each one has a handful of field that the system is going to fill in automatically. like the date

that you filed. This is a great field, right? And you then create a fifth database called the inbox log that acts as an audit trail for this system. And if you're wondering, how do I keep this straight? I can't remember this. This is a second brain. Well, good news. I made a whole guide for it and you can go and grab it on Substack and you don't have to remember this part. Zapier is your automation layer. It's the thing that wires everything together. When a

message appears in your Slack channel, Zapier just sees it and it kicks off the workflow to pipe things into notion. And so the workflow calls an AI, it writes to notion, it fills out all those fields I described and then it replies back in Slack. You can also use make instead of Zapier if you want something that's cheaper. Same idea. The logic is identical. And Clott GPT ends up being your intelligence layer. It's what classifies your thought. It's extracts

the relevant details. It decides where things should go. You give it a very specific prompt with say a JSON schema and it returns structured data that Zapier can then write directly into notion. And so the flow looks like this. Slack captures the stuff. You use Zapier to automate pulling that raw data out. Zapier then makes a call using your structured prompt to Chad GPT or to Claude and they provide the intelligence to structure this out into a useful complete entry that you can make into

your second brain. And then that gets piped into notion. Everything else at that point is just configuration to make it feel like home to you. And so what I find genuinely exciting about this moment, it's not the nerdiness of hooking it up and getting like Zapier to talk to Slack and everything else. The patterns that make these systems work are the exciting thing because even though they're not particularly new and engineers have been building reliable automated systems for a while, we in the

non-engineering world are just now at a point in 2026 where we can leverage these principles to build these kinds of systems without a single line of code. And so I want to be really explicit in this video and I want to teach you the principles that I use to design the system I just described. So you understand how this works and why it scales and you can apply this other places with AI. And so these are principles that govern how we make systems that scale, systems that don't

break, systems that maintain trust over time. These are long-standing engineering principles, and we all need to know them now. And so I'm going to take this opportunity to say, here's the system. Here's the second brain, but also here's how you learn from this. Here are the engineering principles translated for non-engineers that you can latch on to. And when you understand these things, you can build things that used to require a principal engineer to implement. So here's the building

blocks. Engineers have really fancy names for these things, but I'm going to give you plain language that actually make sense. There are about eight core pieces that make a second brain system work. And once you see them, you're going to recognize them in a bunch of other reliable systems, and that's going to help you build fluency that you will need with AI in 2026. The first building block is what I call the Dropbox. Engineers are going to call this the capture door or the ingress point. It's

blocks. Engineers have really fancy names for these things, but I'm going to give you plain language that actually make sense. There are about eight core pieces that make a second brain system work. And once you see them, you're going to recognize them in a bunch of other reliable systems, and that's going to help you build fluency that you will need with AI in 2026. The first building block is what I call the Dropbox. Engineers are going to call this the capture door or the ingress point. It's

the one place you're allowed to throw things without thinking. It has to be frictionless. If capturing a thought takes more than a couple of seconds, you're actually not going to do it consistently despite your good intentions. It's not a moral failing. It's just human nature. So, you need one place, one action, one consistent habit. In this system, the Dropbox, say that five times fast, is a Slack channel called SB Inbox. You create it, you make it private, you pin a message explaining

what goes in there. From then on, whenever a thought appears in your head that you don't want to lose, you open up Slack, you go to that channel, and you just type it in. One message, done. You're not allowed to have three capture points, you have only one, and it requires zero decisions. The second building block is the sorter. Engineers call this a classifier. They call it a router. It's the AI step that decides what bucket your thought belongs in without you having to think about it. Is

this about a person, a project, an idea, some admin errand that you need to do? Here's why this matters. The number one reason second brains fail is they require taxonomy work at capture time. They force you to decide where something goes. And for non-engineers, that decision is where systems go to die. It's the blank canvas problem, the perfect structure fantasy, the slow drift into fiddling with folders instead of actually capturing thoughts. So, the sortter removes all of that entirely.

You throw a raw thought at your Slack channel. Zapier picks it up and sends it to Claude or GPT with a classification prompt. The AI then figures out what it is, extracts the relevant details, names it something useful, and returns structured JSON. Classification is a solved problem this year in 2026. You can let the model do the sorting, and it will just work. The third building block is the form. Engineers call this the schema. They might call it a data contract. It's the set of fields your

system promises to produce and store for each type of thing. So, for a person in your people database, this can mean the name, the context about who they are and how you know them, follow-ups that you need to remember for next time you talk, and a timestamp for when you last updated their entry. For a project, it can be the name, the status, which could be active or waiting or blocked or someday or done, the literal next action you need to take, and any relevant

notes. If it's an idea, maybe it's a title, a oneliner that captures the core insight, and space for elaboration. So, why does this matter? Because without a consistent form, you're going to get messy notes that can't be reliably queried, that can't be reliably summarized or surfaced. Claude is not going to generate a useful daily digest if every entry is structured differently. The form is what makes automation possible. It's what is what lets the system compound like a good

notes. If it's an idea, maybe it's a title, a oneliner that captures the core insight, and space for elaboration. So, why does this matter? Because without a consistent form, you're going to get messy notes that can't be reliably queried, that can't be reliably summarized or surfaced. Claude is not going to generate a useful daily digest if every entry is structured differently. The form is what makes automation possible. It's what is what lets the system compound like a good

flywheel. The fourth building block is the filing cabinet. Engineers call this the memory store or the source of truth. It's where the system writes facts so that they can be reused later. It has to be writable by automation and readable by humans. And it has to support simple filters and views. So in this system, your filing cabinet is notion. Specifically, it's the four databases I talked about, right? It's people, project ideas, and admin. And notion databases are visual. They're really

flywheel. The fourth building block is the filing cabinet. Engineers call this the memory store or the source of truth. It's where the system writes facts so that they can be reused later. It has to be writable by automation and readable by humans. And it has to support simple filters and views. So in this system, your filing cabinet is notion. Specifically, it's the four databases I talked about, right? It's people, project ideas, and admin. And notion databases are visual. They're really

easy to edit without breaking anything. You can create different views filtered by status, by date, by tags. when something goes wrong, you can see what happened and fix it directly. And critically, Notion has a solid API that Zapier can write to reliably. The fifth building block is the receipt. Engineers call this an audit trail or a ledger. It's a record of what came in, what the system did with it, and how confident it was. And that matters more than a lot of

us might realize. You don't really abandon systems because they're imperfect. You abandon them because you stop trusting them. And you stop trusting them because errors feel mysterious. something went wrong, but you don't know what or when or why, and you can't predict when the next error is going to happen, and you just give up. The receipt fixes that. In this system, your receipt is a notion database called inbox log. And every capture gets logged there with the original text that you

typed, where it was filed, what it was named, and a confident score from the AI. And now when something looks off, you trace it. You can see what the system decided. You can see why comes from visibility, and visibility comes from logging. The sixth building block is the bouncer. Engineers call this a confidence filter or a guardrail. I like bouncer as a word. It's the mechanism that prevents lowquality outputs from polluting your memory storage. And here's how it works. When Claude or Chad

GPT classifies your thought, it also returns a confidence score between zero and one. If that confidence is below a threshold, let's say 6, the system doesn't file it into people. It doesn't file it into projects. It doesn't file it into ideas. Instead, it logs it in inbox log with a status that says needs review and sends you a Slack reply asking for a clarification. I'm not sure where this goes. Can you repost it with a prefix like person or project or idea? I couldn't classify. This single

mechanism is what keeps your second brain from becoming a junk drawer. The fastest way to kill a system is to fill it with garbage. The bouncer keeps things clean enough that you maintain trust, and trust is what keeps you using it. The seventh building block is the tap on the shoulder. Engineers call this proactive surfacing or notification. It's the system pushing useful information to you at the right time without you having to search for it. So in this system, the tap on the shoulder

is a daily Slack DM that arrives at whatever time you want in the morning and is generated by a scheduled Zapier automation that queries your notion databases, pulls your active projects, any people with noted follow-ups, and sends that to Claude or Chad GPT with a summarization prompt, and then delivers a nice digest directly to your Slack DMs. And the digest will have three parts, right? It's going to have the top three actions for the day. It's going to have one thing you might be stuck on

that you're avoiding and one small win to notice. It's designed to fit on a phone screen. It's designed for you to read it in 2 minutes, to know what matters today, and to start your day with confidence. And these nudges, they're not optional features. They're what makes this system alive instead of dead. Humans don't retrieve consistently. We don't wake up and think, I should search my notion databases for relevant information about the meeting I have today. In the

advertisements, we do that, but we don't really do that. We do respond to what shows up in front of us. The tap on the shoulder exploits that. It puts the right information in your path so you don't have to remember to look for it. There's also a weekly version. Every Sunday at say whatever time, 4 p.m. whenever you want to have the Sunday scaries, right? Another Zapier automation runs. It queries everything from the past seven days in your inbox log, pulls your active projects, sends

it all to Claude or chat GPT with a review prompt, and then delivers a weekly summary to your Slack DMs. And that summary, it'll tell you what happened. It tells you what your biggest open loops are. Three suggested actions for next week and one recurring theme that the system noticed. And so the Sunday review becomes a cadence that you can trust. It it's what turns storage into a consistent weekly direction. And without it, you're kind of just accumulating notes like the old way. The

eighth building block is the fix button. Engineers would call this a feedback handle or a human in the loop correction mechanism. It's the one-step way to correct mistakes without opening dashboards or without trying to do maintenance. In this system, whenever the Zapier automation files something, it's going to reply in the Slack thread confirming what it did. Hey, this was filed as a project. The project is website relaunch. The confidence was 087 reply fix if I got it wrong. If the

filing was wrong, all you do is reply in the thread fix colon. This should be people, not projects. And the system will just update it. So why does that matter? Because systems get adopted when they're easy to repair. If fixing errors feels like work if you have to open notion and navigate to the right database and find the entry and you're not going to do that. You're going to stop engaging. Corrections must be trivial or people will not make them. Now, let me give you the principles that

make those building blocks actually work. These these are engineering principles, but they're not complicated. They're just rules that experienced system builders have learned. And when you understand them, you can build things that do not fall apart. Principle number one, reduce the human's job to one reliable behavior. If your system requires three behaviors, you don't have a system. You have a self-improvement program. And non-engineers will not run those programs very consistently. The

scalable move is to make the human do one thing, which in this case is capture it in Slack. Everything else is automation. Classification is Claude or Chad GPT doing the work and filing is Zapier doing the work and surfacing is a scheduled automation. You get the idea. The human's job is just to throw thoughts at the channel. That's it. Principle number two, separate memory from compute and from interface. This is the single most important architectural principle and it's how you build

something that lasts. Memory is where truth lives. That's your notion database in this system. Compute is where the logic run. That's zap year and that's claude. Interface is where the human interacts. That's in Slack. Why would we separate those? Because it makes the system portable and swappable. You can change your interface from Slack to Microsoft Teams without rebuilding everything. You can swap Claude for Chad GPT without touching your databases. You can move from notion to Air Table if

your company wants you to or if you feel like it. Every layer has just one job and they connect through clear boundaries. This is also why I don't recommend starting with Obsidian if you're a non-engineer, even though Obsidian is a beautiful tool. Obsidian stores everything as local markdown files, which is really great for portability. It's great for ownership, but writing into local files from cloud automation introduces a layer of syncing and plumbing that may seem trivial for

engineers, but I find is often frustrating for everybody else. So, starting with notion makes that automation really clean, and you can always migrate later if you want something that's local first. Principle number three, treat prompts like APIs, not like creative writing. A scalable agentic prompt is a contract. It's a fixed input format. It's a fixed output format. It's no surprises. You give Claude or Chad GPT a schema. You give it rules and you tell it to return JSON

only with no explanation and no markdown. That feels restrictive and that's the whole point. You don't want the model to be helpful in uncontrolled ways in this system. You want it to fill out a form. The prompt specifies exactly what fields to return, exactly what values are valid, and exactly how to handle ambiguous cases. Reliable beats creative in these systems. And it's really important to remember that as you start to build things. Principle four, always build a trust mechanism, not just

a capability. So a capability is the bot files the notes, right? A trust mechanism is I believe the filing enough to keep using it because and so trust comes from the inbox log that shows you everything that happened. Confidence scores from the fix button that makes corrections trivial. Without these small things, you might think the system would still function, but small errors tend to compound. And with them, the system actually can learn and earn your confidence over time. Principle number

a capability. So a capability is the bot files the notes, right? A trust mechanism is I believe the filing enough to keep using it because and so trust comes from the inbox log that shows you everything that happened. Confidence scores from the fix button that makes corrections trivial. Without these small things, you might think the system would still function, but small errors tend to compound. And with them, the system actually can learn and earn your confidence over time. Principle number

five, you want to default to safe behavior when uncertain. A real agentic system has to know how to fail gracefully. The safest default is when Claude or Chad GPT isn't sure is you just log the item and write that Slack message and ask for clarification. And that's exactly why we have a confidence threshold. When confidence is below whatever number you select, I'm suggesting 6. It doesn't file. It just holds. It asks. It might seem boring, but it's essential to build trust.

Principle number six, make output small, frequent, and actionable. Non-engineers don't want a weekly 2,000word analysis, right? They want a top three list that fits on a phone screen. Frankly, most engineers do, too. They want a Slack DM they can read in 2 minutes. Most engineers do, too. Small outputs reduce cognitive load and increase follow-through. So, the daily digest needs to be under 150 words, and the weekly review needs to be under 250 words. That's very intentional. Agentic

systems scale when they produce very useful outputs that are small but extremely reliable on a set cadence. And then at the end of the day, you start trusting them because you're essentially getting a breadcrumb of trust and value every time you use it. Principle number seven, use next action as the unit of execution. So what I mean by that is most project notes fail because they store intentions, not actions. Work on the website is not executable. Email Sarah to confirm the copy deadline is

very executable. And so that's why the project database will need to have a field called next action. And the classification prompt needs to be tuned to extract very specific actions from what is probably a vague statement on your part because if your project entries don't have concrete actions, your daily digest is going to end up feeling motivational rather than operational. And this is all about helping you be more operational in a way that's reliable without you having to

very executable. And so that's why the project database will need to have a field called next action. And the classification prompt needs to be tuned to extract very specific actions from what is probably a vague statement on your part because if your project entries don't have concrete actions, your daily digest is going to end up feeling motivational rather than operational. And this is all about helping you be more operational in a way that's reliable without you having to

put more cognitive work into it. Principle eight, prefer routing over organizing. Humans hate organizing. Most of us, not all of us, most of us. Most of us like dropping things in a box and forgetting about them. Claude is good at routing. Chai GBT is good at routing. The principle is don't make users maintain structures. Let the system route into a small set of stable buckets. And that's why the system I'm suggesting has really only four categories: people, projects, ideas, and

admin. More categories can feel more precise, but can be much harder to scale. It creates more decisions, more confusion, more drift. Four buckets is usually enough. You can always add more later if you really discover a need. Principle nine, keep the number of categories and fields painfully small. This is counterintuitive for smart people. We we want richness. We want nuance, but richness creates friction, and friction kills adoption. So, the people database, I'm suggesting it has

admin. More categories can feel more precise, but can be much harder to scale. It creates more decisions, more confusion, more drift. Four buckets is usually enough. You can always add more later if you really discover a need. Principle nine, keep the number of categories and fields painfully small. This is counterintuitive for smart people. We we want richness. We want nuance, but richness creates friction, and friction kills adoption. So, the people database, I'm suggesting it has

like just a few fields, right? the person's name, the last time you connected with them, the ideas database, five fields at most. And the idea is if you have minimal fields, you can always add sophistication later. But if you start simple and stay simple, it gives you the option to continue to use the system, and you only have to add complexity when evidence says it's needed. Principle 10, build your design for restart, not for perfection. A scalable system assumes users will fall

off. Life happens, you get sick, you travel, you have a rough week at work. The system should be easy to restart without guilt or cleanup. If missing a week creates some kind of backlog monster, you're not going to restart. You're just going to feel bad about yourself. And so, that's why the operating manual for this system explicitly says, "Don't catch up. Just restart. Do a 10-minute brain dump into your inbox with whatever you've got and resume tomorrow." And the automation

off. Life happens, you get sick, you travel, you have a rough week at work. The system should be easy to restart without guilt or cleanup. If missing a week creates some kind of backlog monster, you're not going to restart. You're just going to feel bad about yourself. And so, that's why the operating manual for this system explicitly says, "Don't catch up. Just restart. Do a 10-minute brain dump into your inbox with whatever you've got and resume tomorrow." And the automation

will keep things running whether you engage or not. the system waits for you and is supportive and is easy to restart. Principle 11, build one workflow and then attach modules. So the scalable pattern is to build a core loop that works for everybody and then add optional capabilities later. And so the core loop is capture to Slack, file to notion, get a daily digest, get a weekly review. That's the minimum viable loop here. And once that's running, once you trust it, you can add voice capture if

you want. You can add meeting prep by integrating it with your calendar. You can add email forwarding. You can add birthday reminders, but you don't do that first. You build the core loop first. Principle 12, optimize for maintainability over cleverness. So the engineering temptation is to build a beautiful system with so many moving parts and elegant abstractions. And the real world reality is that moving parts are failure points. And so optimize for fewer tools, fewer steps, clear logs,

you want. You can add meeting prep by integrating it with your calendar. You can add email forwarding. You can add birthday reminders, but you don't do that first. You build the core loop first. Principle 12, optimize for maintainability over cleverness. So the engineering temptation is to build a beautiful system with so many moving parts and elegant abstractions. And the real world reality is that moving parts are failure points. And so optimize for fewer tools, fewer steps, clear logs,

easy reconnects. When your Zapier automation stops because your Slack token expired, which is a real thing, you want to fix it in five minutes, not debug it for an hour. And when notion permissions get weird, you want to reconnect and move on. That's what makes this actually scale. Now, I often get complaints on these videos that I don't give enough detail. No complaints here. I'm going to walk you through step by step what we're doing. First, create the Slack channel. Go to Slack. Create a new

easy reconnects. When your Zapier automation stops because your Slack token expired, which is a real thing, you want to fix it in five minutes, not debug it for an hour. And when notion permissions get weird, you want to reconnect and move on. That's what makes this actually scale. Now, I often get complaints on these videos that I don't give enough detail. No complaints here. I'm going to walk you through step by step what we're doing. First, create the Slack channel. Go to Slack. Create a new

channel called Whatever You Want. Make it private if you wish. And pin a message that explain what goes there. Something like, "Drop a thought here. one thought per message etc. Second, you want to create the notion databases. You want to create a new page called second brain and inside it you want to create your five databases as table people might have name context follow-ups last touched tags project status next action notes ideas could have name and oneliner

and yes there there's there's going to be a whole worksheet for you if you want to get this in the substacks you don't have to remember this but I'm just going through the detail right you want to have uh the name of the idea the oneliner the notes the tags etc and admin would have the name the due date the status etc inbox log. It has to have captured text file to destination record the confidence level when it was created. Third, you connect Zapier to Slack and to Notion to make that pipe.

So you go to Zapier, you connect your Slack account, you connect your notion account, and when notion asks which pages Zapier can access, make sure you grant access to the right page. Fourth, you want to build the automation. So create a new zap and the trigger is new message posted to channel in the Slack and it's filtered to just that one channel you want like SP inbox. The next step is an AI action that sends the message to Claude or Chad GBT with your classification prompt. The prompt tells

it to classify into people, project ideas or admin and yes, I'll supply this prompt and then it returns JSON. And then the next step, you're just parsing that JSON. You add paths that route based on the destination. If it's people, create a record in the people database. If it's projects, you create in projects and so on. Fifth, you want to build your morning digest. Create another zap. The triggers a daily schedule at whatever time in the morning. the action queries your notion

database and you send that query result to claude or chat GPT with a summarization prompt. Again, I'll provide the summarization prompt. Then you can build the weekly review with the same pattern. That's the whole system. It's three Zapier automations. It's four notion databases plus a log. It's one channel. Look, it might not even take an hour to set this up. And maybe it'll take 90 minutes if you're comfortable with Zapier. Now, let me tell you what this will feel like when it's working,

though. You will feel lighter. It's not because you're more productive in some fantastically measurable way. It's because you're closing all of the open loops that are living in your head constantly. And you'll notice yourself thinking, I should remember that. And instead of trying to leave it as an open loop in your head, you're going to post it into your SB inbox and move along because you don't have to think about it anymore. And so your head will get clearer. And so you're going to notice

though. You will feel lighter. It's not because you're more productive in some fantastically measurable way. It's because you're closing all of the open loops that are living in your head constantly. And you'll notice yourself thinking, I should remember that. And instead of trying to leave it as an open loop in your head, you're going to post it into your SB inbox and move along because you don't have to think about it anymore. And so your head will get clearer. And so you're going to notice

that you're able to show up with more continuity for the people that matter to you, for the projects that matter to you, for the work. you'll have an easier time remembering details. And then as you go along and use it more, you're going to start to compound because the projects are going to start to develop patterns that you can see and notice over time. And that's going to enable you to get smarter about giving input back to the system through SP inbox. Your anxiety, if you're someone who

tries to remember everything, it doesn't magically go away entirely, but it definitely changes in character. It stops being just this background hum of all of your unttracked commitments and it starts being a small set of next actions that you can actually take. It's basically a a factory for turning your anxiety and your difficulty in remembering things into action. Now, I got to be honest with you. I am going to give you this video and most people will not actually build this. Not because

it's hard. You've heard me describe it. It doesn't take that long. It's because we've normalized the leakage that comes from being busy. We scroll through YouTube, it's like, ah, Nate's saying something again, he'll come up with another video. I want you to think about it as the cost of a system that we fail to build isn't just missed ideas. It's that your work becomes less compounding. The value you create in 2026 is lower because you're not building on that

value as intentionally as you could be. And so, if you're watching this in January and you're thinking about what project might actually change the year, think about doing this one, right? You're not building a productivity system. You're not building something to feel good about yourself. You're just relentlessly taking charge of your actual brain and giving it a support system that helps it to work effectively. And for the first time in human history, you have access to

systems that will work for you while you sleep. That classify your thoughts without you deciding, that surface the right information without you searching, that nudge you toward the goals and priorities you've set without you having to remember them. And you don't even have to be an engineer to build this. You just have to understand patterns. And that's exactly what I've laid out in this video. So that's the whole architecture. And in 2026, you can build it yourself. And yes, I have all of the

guides for this on the Substack. I hope this has been helpful. I want everyone to feel like one, they can build something with AI. Two, it's worth doing. Three, if you build smartly, you are building in a way that allows you to compound your advantage over time, which is going to be really important as AI moves faster in 2026. So, that's how to build a second brain without a line of code. And those are the engineering principles that you're using even if you're not an engineer. Hope you enjoyed

this one.