CODE: The Four Stages of a Note

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0500

Yesterday I walked through the history of the second brain, the 500-year arc from glued paper slips to LLM-readable vaults. Today I want to zoom in on one piece of it: CODE, Tiago Forte’s four-stage life cycle of a note. If PARA is where things go, CODE is what you do with them. It’s the process half of his methodology from Building a Second Brain (2022), and it breaks down into four moves.

C: Capture. Get ideas out of your head and into the system. Don’t filter, collect.
O: Organize. Sort captured notes by actionability, not topic.
D: Distill. Refine notes over time so each one gets denser and more usable.
E: Express. Actually use the knowledge. Write, build, decide, share.

Let me give you an example of each.

Capture

You record ideas, quotes, links, and observations as they happen, straight into a temporary inbox. The one rule here is that you don’t organize while you capture. Sorting mid-thought kills the flow. Just get it out of your biological brain and into a note, and don’t worry about where it lives yet.

How you do it doesn’t matter much. Quick-capture apps, web clippers, voice memos, a daily notes file, whatever has the least friction. Capture first, organize later. That’s the whole rule.

Organize

This is where you move inbox items into the right place, and Forte’s twist is that you sort by actionability instead of subject. A note about React hooks doesn’t go in a “programming” folder. It goes into the project it serves, or into Resources if it’s reference material, or into Archives if the project is already done.

Organize is also where everyone’s opinions start to diverge. PARA imposes folders. Zettelkasten throws folders out entirely and organizes by links and unique IDs. There’s no single right answer, and most people end up mixing both.

Distill

This is Forte’s signature move, also called progressive summarization. You read a note and highlight the key passages. On a later pass, you bold the best of those highlights. On an even later pass, you write a short summary of the bolded parts in your own words. Each pass makes the note denser and faster to reuse. You’re building a highlight reel of your own past thinking.

The catch is that aggressive summarizing strips context, and there’s real debate about how far to take it. In the age of AI this matters more, not less. If you compress a note down to three bullet points, you’ve thrown away the surrounding detail that a model (or future you) might need. Distill, but don’t shred.

Express

Express is the payoff, and it’s the stage most note systems quietly skip. You turn distilled notes into output: a blog post, a decision, some new code, a presentation, a reply to an email. This is the part that makes the thing a brain and not a filing cabinet. A filing cabinet stores. A brain produces.

By making Express an explicit, named stage, Forte is fixing the most common failure mode of note-taking, which is collect-and-forget. You hoard articles you never reread and clip quotes you never use. Naming the output step forces the question: what is any of this actually for?

And, by the way, congratulations. You now have yet another thing to maintain.

CODE vs. Zettelkasten

CODE isn’t the only game in town, and it’s worth seeing it next to the other big approach.

	CODE (Forte)	Zettelkasten
Organizing principle	Actionability (PARA folders)	Links + unique IDs
Note shape	Action-oriented, distilled	Atomic, linked
Structure	Imposed folders	Emergent graph
Goal	Produce output	Think with a partner

In practice people combine the two. PARA folders for where things go, wikilinks for how they connect. You don’t have to pick a team.

Why it works

Strip away the acronym and three things are doing the actual work here:

External cognition. Offloading capture frees your biological brain to think instead of remember.
Spaced encounter. Each distillation pass re-exposes you to old ideas in a new, denser form.
Output bias. Making Express a real stage counters the collect-and-forget trap.

That’s CODE. Four letters, one honest goal: not to hoard your thinking, but to ship it.

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Sources

Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain (2022). The CODE workflow (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express) and its relationship to PARA.
The PARA Method: Building a Second Brain. PARA’s four categories (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) and the actionability-over-topic sorting principle.
Tiago Forte, “Progressive Summarization” (Forte Labs, 2017). The layered highlight/bold/summarize technique that the post calls “Distill.”
Zettelkasten (Wikipedia). The link-and-unique-ID organizing principle, atomic notes, and emergent graph structure contrasted with PARA in the comparison table.
Niklas Luhmann (Wikipedia). Luhmann’s description of his Zettelkasten as a “thinking partner” (the “Think with a partner” row of the table).

Para on LLBBL Blog