If you’re like me, your digital life is everywhere.
Passwords, your driver’s license, a copy of your insurance card. Tasks scribbled on a sticky note. A half-baked idea in your notes app. A podcast highlight you swore you’d remember later.
Most of us are crazy disorganized when it comes to information. We capture it, forget about it, and then waste time searching when we need it most.
Tiago Forte’s CODE framework is the simplest solution I’ve found for taming the chaos. It’s how I keep all my notes, tasks, and ideas flowing into a system that actually works.
The CODE Framework
- C – Capture: Grab ideas, notes, tasks, documents—whatever crosses your path—and drop them somewhere you can trust.
- O – Organize: Put those captures into the right place: projects, tags, or categories where they’ll be useful.
- D – Distill: Summarize and strip things down to the essentials. Delete what’s irrelevant. Keep only what’s actionable or valuable.
- E – Express: Use the distilled information to actually do something—write, build, decide, create.
Simple, but powerful.
How I Apply CODE
Here’s how it looks in my world:
- Capture: Everything flows into Notion. I’ve got two inboxes:
- Task Inbox → quick capture app on my phone.
- Notes Inbox → voice notes (Fireflies), meeting notes via Zapier, Chrome web clipper, and other random captures.
- Organize: I process these inboxes daily and weekly with an SOP I built for myself. Each task or note gets linked to the right project or tagged for later.
- Distill: During that process, I trim things down. A long voice note becomes two bullet points. A saved article gets clipped to just the one quote I care about. Sometimes, I delete the whole thing because it’s no longer useful.
- Express: This is where it all pays off. Each morning I look at my current projects and today’s tasks. The associated notes are right there in Notion, so I can use them to move my business forward, create content, or make decisions without starting from scratch.
Next Steps
Most founders don’t need more ideas. We need better systems to use the ideas we already have.
CODE gives you a repeatable way to take the scattered inputs of your digital life and turn them into organized, usable assets.
If you’ve been feeling the weight of digital clutter - give this framework a shot.
If you need help implementing it in practice, shoot me an email! I can share my exact tools and templates.