Everything was moving at the speed of light
I started a new job on August 31, in an industry that's new to me after Macy's, CVS, Elevance and GoodRx. And they needed me onboarded yesterday. There was a lot that needed to happen, and all of it was happening at once.
Here's the thing. I was taking in an enormous amount of information in a very short window, and I can't possibly remember all of it. Prices, promo windows, launch dates, who owns what, what got decided before I showed up and why. I also want to be present in my conversations with people, not typing notes of every single thing they're saying.
So in my first week I turned the mic on. Zoom records every meeting I'm in. I wanted a way to remember everything people said to me, so I could stop re-learning things and start building strategies and plans, which is the actual job.
What that turned into is a folder on my desktop that I call my second brain. It's been running the whole two months I've been there. I feel like what I built would be valuable for anybody working at any company, or for themselves, so here's what it is and a step-by-step on how to do it.
What the Brain actually is
It's a folder. Inside the folder there's one file per topic: products and pricing, launch dates, the promo calendar, paid media, email, personas, decisions, about 25 in all. Every fact in those files has a source and a date next to it. When a fact changes, the old one gets replaced.
I don't even maintain it. I set up scheduled jobs that do that every day. Every weekday at 4:30 a job reads the full transcript of every meeting I had, the actual transcript and not the AI summary, because summaries drop numbers and lose who decided what. It writes notes on the meeting and files them away in my Google Doc notes, so I can revisit them myself whenever I want. The business facts go into the Brain. At 8:30 the next morning another job sweeps my Slack, reads the shared docs other people update every week, and folds everything into the topic files. On Friday afternoon a third one reads the whole week back to me: what I worked on and what I learned.
Then I open the folder in Claude (or ChatGPT, it can read the same folder) and ask it things the way I'd ask a coworker. What's the offer in this window? What did we decide about the Black Friday email? It answers with the most current thing it knows and tells me where that came from. If it's not in there, it says "not in the Brain" and tells me where it probably lives, which is usually a doc or a person.
The rule that matters more than the folder
Let's be real, recording my meetings makes me feel like a spy or something. But I do it so I can actually be present and talk to people instead of writing down every single thing they say, and I remember it better. And I'm remote. Those meetings are the only time I have a personal conversation with anyone. Somebody's kid, somebody's weekend, somebody needing to vent for a minute.
None of that goes in the Brain. The rule written into the folder is business facts only. Nothing about what a colleague thinks or feels. Names, titles, who owns what, and decisions with who made them are fine. Every job lists what it left out, so I can see the filter working.
Think about your own brain. Would you want to share the parts of it that hold all your personal conversations with your coworkers? No. You'd want to share only the business facts. That's the whole idea, because I do want to share this with my team (people have already asked, I just haven't figured out the mechanics yet), and nobody should feel like they're being spied on.
How I use it
I use AI constantly now, and it's constantly working on things for me, sometimes several at once. While I'm in a meeting, the Brain is running. One job is filing the last meeting. A session is checking a brief against what got approved. Another is drafting next month's strategy off this month's. I'm managing it the way I'd manage a team, except the team reads the folder instead of asking me.
Ways I use it that I think anybody could use:
- Remembering. What did we decide about X. Where's the doc for Y. What's the current price, what's the offer in this window, who owns this.
- Researching. Pulling together large amounts of information, consolidating it, and organizing it so I can actually use it.
- Reviewing. An email or a page checked against the audience and the actual product facts. Whether a brief still matches what got approved.
- Building. Next month's strategy off this month's. A new brief in the format of the last one. A positioning draft from the research that's already in there.
- Prepping. An agenda or a talk track for a meeting, built from everything that's happened since the last one.
What it gets wrong. It gets overly hung up on certain facts that don't matter. It doesn't know how to weight the prioritization of information, so a stray number from a Slack thread lands with the same seriousness as a decision from leadership. The things I correct it on most are over-explaining, rewriting things nobody asked it to rewrite, and reopening settled decisions by calling them proposed. I haven't solved the weighting problem yet. I also noticed it's getting too big and a bit messy, so I built a monthly cleanup to fix that. It hasn't run yet.
Build one
None of this is hard to set up. The pieces are a meeting recorder that produces transcripts, a folder, the Claude or ChatGPT desktop app with the folder open, and a few scheduled jobs. I use both, but the routines run in Claude. Connectors for Slack and Google Drive. Gmail too if your company lets you connect it. Email isn't in my Brain, but honestly, not much communication is happening by email anyway.
Here's how I set it up, in order. I didn't design any of this. I told Claude what I wanted and the shape of it, and it figured out the rest. I've been iterating on it ever since. It took a month or two of iteration to get it here, and that's why I'm sharing it now, because I think it's in a good place.
1. Turn the recorder on
Zoom's notes feature records meetings you're in, not just ones you host. Google Meet's Gemini notes work too. Every meeting, every day. A meeting with no transcript doesn't exist as far as the Brain is concerned.
2. Make the folder and tell it what you want
Make a folder on your desktop. Open it in the Claude desktop app. Then describe what you want and let it build the structure. This is roughly what I said:
I want a brain for my job. A folder where every fact about my work is organized by topic, and every fact says where it came from and when. Keep what's true today separate from what used to be true. Keep a running list of open questions. Business facts only: nothing about what coworkers think or feel, nothing personal, because I'm going to share this with my team. Set up the folder, write the rules into it so every future session follows them, and tell me what you built.
Then load it up. Give it every doc you'd want it to know (decks, planning sheets, briefs, your own notes) and ask it to read them all and file the facts by topic. When that's done, ask it five real questions you'd ask a coworker. If you get two different answers to one of them, it found a conflict, and you tell it which one is right.
One warning. Do this in a folder on your computer, not inside a Claude Project. I tried the Project first, blew through way too many tokens, and couldn't use AI for the rest of the week.
3. Set up the routines
These are scheduled tasks in the Claude desktop app. Each one is a prompt that runs on a schedule while you're doing something else. Copy, fill in the brackets, and you're done.
Meeting notes. Weekdays at 4:30pm. This is the one that means you never take notes again.
Every weekday at 4:30pm, find every meeting I had in the last 7 days that hasn't been filed yet. Read the full transcript in Zoom, never the AI summary. For each meeting, write notes: what was decided, key facts and numbers as spoken, open questions, actions with owners. Leave out personal chatter. Add the notes to [my notes Google Doc]. Then file the business facts into the Brain at [folder path], following the rules written in the folder. Report in a few lines what you filed and what you skipped. Don't ask me questions; I'm usually not watching.
The morning sweep. Weekdays at 8:30am. Slack and shared docs are where facts change overnight. This is the job that keeps the topic files current.
Every weekday at 8:30am, work inside the Brain at [folder path] and follow its rules. Sweep my Slack from where the last sweep ended through now: every DM, group, channel and thread I'm in. Pull anything that states a number, a date, a price, a decision, a status change, or a link to a doc with business facts. Read [the shared docs other people update weekly] and pull what's new. Then fold everything new into the right topic files. Replace facts that changed. Where two sources disagree, note both and what would settle it. Business facts only. Tell me in under 20 lines what changed.
The Friday recap. Fridays at 3pm. It reads the week and tells me what I worked on, what I learned, and the three things I should do next week, ranked. It's the only reflection I'd never sit down and do on my own.
The monthly cleanup. First of the month. It retires anything whose window has passed, flags facts over 60 days old that depend on a price or a date, merges duplicates, and lists the open questions nobody has touched in 30 days. Everything gets logged and nothing gets retired on its own, which is how the folder got messy. Transparently, mine hasn't run yet.
4. Talk to it
Open the folder in Claude or ChatGPT and ask the question you'd ask a coworker. When you paste something in and say "add this to the Brain," it files it. When two facts disagree, you say which one is right and the next morning's sweep fixes it. That's the whole job on your end.
If you build one, I'd love to know what you take from this and how you iterate on it.