Category: Strategic Marketing

A while back a client told me, halfway through a call, that her daughter was about to leave for university and she was dreading the empty house. Nothing to do with the work, but just a human thing she mentioned.

Three weeks later we spoke again and I forgot to ask her how she was doing. Not because I didn’t care, but because I’d captured it where I captured everything then, which was nowhere 🫣.

I help people build a reputation through relationships. “Reputation built on people, not platforms” is sort of my message.

And meanwhile, I was letting the context of my own relationships live in tools that aren’t made for this kind of relationship management. Your email inbox, LinkedIn messages and WhatsApp aren’t there to help you build relationships; they are there to make the companies behind them some money.

So I started building something to fix that. It’s early, and the personal knowledge experts might say it’s just beyond the phase where it holds together with tape in places.

But I don’t want to wait to walk you through what it is and why this might be my biggest breakthrough in the last 15 years.

Where your relationships live

Here is the typical “Relationship Management System” of people like you and me.

1. A name in your phone.
2. An email thread in Gmail.
3. A calendar entry that says “coffee w/ Jeroen”.
4. A transcript in a notetaker.
5. A connection on LinkedIn.

Five tools, none of them talking to each other, all of them owned by companies whose job is their own growth, not your life.

And every CRM I ever tried made it worse, because a CRM isn’t built to remember a person. It’s built to push a lead down a funnel or ensure you keep track of when clients are ready to buy “again”. It wants a deal size and a close date. The main issue with it is that it treats your neighbour, partner and best friend the same as a lead you have met and an event last week. So at some point the thing basically asks you what sales stage your partner is in 😵‍💫

As you read in the intro, my biological memory can get an upgrade, but since that’s not on the table, I need an external one. The problem was that my external memory was spread across half a dozen apps, none of them talking to each other, none of them mine to keep.

Everyone’s pointing AI at the wrong thing

At the same time, everyone I know has started pointing AI at exactly one thing, which is the output.

Write an email, write a post, create a presentation, etc. Have a look at one of the newsfeeds on LinkedIn and Substack and it’s full of people explaining how to use skills to fix that. But the more I used it, the more I noticed the thing it was missing.

I don’t need an AI system that writes like me. I need an AI system that knows me, helps me remember, think and connect the dots. Who I’ve met, what we talked about, what matters to them, and when we last spoke.

And this is the part that almost everyone overlooks. AI is only ever as good as what it knows about your (professional) life, and I mean the full spectrum of it. Right now, that information is spread across 12 apps and 4 cloud drives that don’t know or talk to each other.

You can have the smartest assistant on earth and it’s working blind, because the memory it needs is locked inside someone else’s database.

So I asked myself a different question. Instead of “how do I use AI to make more stuff” I asked “How do I build myself a memory good enough that it serves me for life?”

The Life Lens System

That’s when I landed on something Martijn Aslander has been building for a while. A personal, local, tool- and LLM-agnostic system that remembers everything you want it to.

The name is his: the “Life Lens System”. I took the idea and started building my own version. The core is fucking simple. Your life is a set of plain notes you own, forever, that link to each other. No app in the middle. No account you can get locked out of. Just Markdown files.

I build mine in Obsidian, which, under the hood, is a folder of plain text files sitting on my computers.

The good thing about Obsidian is that it has bi-directional linking. So linking a “thing” to another “thing” shows up in both places. This is how you can create a “single source of truth” and that will save you a shit load of time!

One note per person. One note per company. One note per meeting. And the relationships between them are links, the same way your head connects a face to a place to a conversation. Link a person to the meeting, the meeting to the company, and a little map of how everyone connects starts building itself.

I tried this before, but it was always a fuckload of work. I’m not going to sit and type contacts into a form like it’s 2009. But with AI the system feeds itself from what already exists. My calendar knows who I met. My meeting tool has the transcripts of what we said. A small importer pulls those in and turns them into notes on its own. Local, in a format any computer can read.

And since I can’t code for shit, Claude built the whole thing while I described what I wanted in plain words.

A few things it does that a normal contact list can’t:

• It knows how warm a relationship is, and works it out live. Talked this week, it’s on fire; a month back, cooling; longer than that, cold. I never set that by hand, the system does it automatically.
• It dims people instead of deleting them. The hundreds you’ve met once don’t clutter the place up, and they don’t get deleted either. They sit in the background and step forward the moment you talk again.
• It stores the signal, not the message. I don’t want a copy of all emails, but I do want to remember that we talked, when, and roughly about what.

People are only the first lens

The relationship management example is just the first step. The reason it’s a Life Lens System and not a CRM is that the same approach, plain notes you own, linked together, works for everything else too. What you’ve read, what you’re learning, the ideas you’re chasing, the projects you’re in. It’s meant to be a memory for a whole life. I started with people because they are my entire business, so that’s the lens I ground myself in first.

And there’s another reason I am so enthusiastic about this, one that is becoming more important each day as AI infiltrates our lives and work.

Everyone (especially companies) is handing their thinking, their writing, their relationships to tools they don’t own, on the assumption that those tools will always be there.

They won’t.

Companies get bought, prices suddenly double overnight, Orange Uncle Donald decides you can’t use it anymore, and the feature disappears.

Plain text on your own disk outlives every one of them. Own the memory and you can point whatever AI comes next straight at it. Rent it, and you get whatever big tech decides to hand you that month.

Where to start?

I’m not handing you a finished system because I don’t have one. But if you recognise any of this, here’s where I’d start, and roughly where I did:

1. Pick one slice. Don’t try to build an operating system for your whole life on day one. I started with people, because that’s where both my money and my meaning come from. Yours might be what you read, or what you’re learning.
2. Own the files. Plain text, on your own machine, and a layer to connect them like Obsidian. If a note only opens inside one company’s app, it isn’t yours.
3. Let AI feed it what you already have. Don’t type it all in. Point it at your notes, calendar, your meeting notes, the stuff you already have, and let it fill itself.
4. Keep who, when, and what mattered. Skip the rest. You don’t need the whole transcript of a meeting, but you do need to understand the nuances.

I’m early on this, but Martijn Aslander is light years ahead. Have a look at https://martijnaslander.github.io/life-lens-system/ for what’s possible in your future.

The point isn’t a better database

That client I told you about in the intro? Yesterday we called. Before I picked up, I opened her note. The situation with her daughter and the empty-house thing was right there. So I asked how she’d settled in. The pause on the other end told me she wasn’t expecting it, because almost nobody remembers anymore.

That’s why I love this stuff. It’s a bit nerdy, but it’s not about a smarter database.

It’s a way to keep being the person who remembers, in a world that’s quietly agreeing to forget.

Everyone’s using AI and it makes us all fucking lazy. Open LinkedIn and you can smell it. Tidy paragraphs that have no soul, a neat three-point takeaway, and underneath it all, nothing anyone actually thinks. A whole feed of people who typed “write me a post about leadership” and posted what came back, then wondered why it landed like a wet napkin.

The tool isn’t the problem. Your laziness to build context is. You’re handing the best writing tool you’ve ever had one vague sentence and expecting it to read your mind. It can’t, or at least not yet, so it gives you the average of everything ever written on the topic.

The fix is not that hard, and it’s not some €47 magic prompt you buy off a guy in your DMs. It’s five things you tell the AI before you ask it for anything.

The five things a good brief has

Think of it like briefing a freelancer on day one. You wouldn’t say “write something good” and walk off. You’d tell them who to be and what you actually need. Same here, and basically it comes down to five things.

Persona. Who it should be. Tell the AI what role to play. “You’re a copywriter with 20 years in B2B.” “You’re a skeptical CFO.” The role shapes everything that follows, and “helpful assistant” is not a role.

Task. What it should do. One clear job. “Summarize the newest trends in digital marketing.” Not “help me with marketing.” The vaguer the ask, the more generic the answer.

Tone. How it should sound. “Professional but informal with a 7/10 humour twist.” Leave it out and you get the default AI voice, the one everyone’s learned to scroll past.

Context. What it’s working with. The one people skip, and the one that matters most. Give it the real material: the post you’re replying to, the client’s situation, an example of how you actually write. this is the most essential part. The more context you build the better it is

Format. What it should look like. “Give it to me as a table, sorted by topic.” “Three short paragraphs, no bullet points.” Tell it the shape or it’ll guess, and it guesses wrong!

Stack those five and the output reads like something you’d put your own name on, instead of something a robot skimmed off a marketing blog.

The trick most people miss

You don’t have to write the perfect brief yourself. Make the AI do it. Paste your rough prompt in and tell it:

You’re an expert at writing prompts. Improve the one below. Sharpen the focus so the question is specific, structure it so the answer is richer and more detailed, and if I gave you an example, swap in a better one. Here’s my prompt: [paste].

It’ll hand you back a version three times better than what you started with. You’re using the tool to write its own brief.

What the prompt bros leave out

You can master all five and still produce forgettable garbage. Because a brilliant brief with nothing behind it just gets you to generic faster.

The thing AI genuinely cannot do is have your point of view. It’ll copy any style you want and nail any format. What it can’t do is have an opinion. It’s never sat across from the client who walked out, and it doesn’t have your years of experience. That part’s yours, and the best “prompt” is really just you feeding the machine your own take and letting it do the typing.

So implement the five, it will save you hours. But a perfect brief with nothing behind it just gets you to generic faster, and the AI will happily help you sound like everyone else at record speed.

The brief is the easy part. What goes into it is the whole game.

Recognize this scenario?

You know you saved it. You can even picture it, a link, a PDF, a note you made after a call with the exact number you now need. And you’ve just burned ten minutes hunting through Notes, Drive, your email, Slack, and two apps you forgot you were paying for. So you give up and google it again, and land on a worse version of something you already had. You just can’t find it, and no new app fixes that, because the app was never where the mess was.

The app graveyard

I love a new app. Especially the ones that promise me I’ll finally be productive and effective and for the love of God finally have some calm. To-do apps, note apps, micro-note apps, bookmarks, three cloud drives. I collect them like other people collect gym memberships in January, and with the same results.

The trap is always the same and I’m stupid enough to keep falling for it. Every app promises to be the one place everything lives. But you do different kinds of work in different phases, and no single app handles all of it well. So you spread your stuff across ten of them, and six months later you have no idea what you were using each one for. The mess just moved into nicer software.

What actually fixes it is a system that sits on top of all your apps, the same shape everywhere, so it stops mattering which one you open.

That system is PARA.

PARA, in plain terms

Tiago Forte built PARA as the backbone of his “second brain” idea. Four buckets, and the whole thing works because there are only four:

• Projects — things with a deadline and an end. Launch the website. Write the talk. Paint the shed. A project finishes, so its folder changes constantly.
• Areas — things you’re responsible for with no end date. Your health. Your finances. Your team. You don’t “finish” your health. You just keep the standard up.
• Resources — stuff you’re keeping because it’s useful across projects: articles, book notes, PDFs, references. Not tied to one deadline.
• Archive — anything from the first three that’s gone quiet. Project done, area no longer relevant, interest faded. Out of sight, still there if you need it.

The one distinction people get wrong is Projects versus Areas, and it’s worth getting right because everything else hangs off it. A deadline makes it a project. “Run a marathon in October” is a project. “Stay fit enough to grow old” is an area. It’s the same topic in two different buckets, and if you file them together the whole system turns to mush.

The point is you use it everywhere

PARA works because you run the same four buckets in every place you keep information. Your note app, your cloud drive, your email, all the same structure. So your brain only ever learns one filing system, and finding something stops being a treasure hunt.

You don’t have to do it all at once. Start in one app. I ran PARA in my notes first, saw it hold up, then rebuilt it in Dropbox, then moved to Obsidian and now have a powerful Exo-Brain.

How to actually start

I’ve gone a long way since I got in touch with the personal knowledge management sphere in 2019. But if I were to start all over again, this is what I would do.

1. Brain dump. Everything you’re carrying: things to do, things to learn, responsibilities, half-ideas. Get it out of your head and onto a page. You can’t organize what you can’t see.

2. Name the projects. Go through the dump and pull out anything with a deadline and an end. “Lose 5 kilos by summer” is a project. “Eat like an adult” is an area. Be honest about which is which.

3. Build the Projects folder first. One folder, a subfolder per project, and drop in the files you already have for each. Mirror the exact same list in your to-do app (Things, Asana, whatever you use) with the subtasks and deadlines.

4. Go do the work, then test it. The whole promise of PARA is that you find what you need for a project faster and without friction. So use it on a real project and see if that’s true. If it is, roll it into the next app. If it isn’t, your buckets are probably mislabeled, go back to step two.

PRO-TIP! If you can ensure your information won’t be locked in by a vendor (for example, if you are going to use Microsoft tools for this), it will be very hard to pivot to Google. Last year, I switched to Obsidian and now have all my information in the markdown format. Markdown is readable by every computer no matter the operating system you use and is very easy to read and write for any AI

Why this matters more now than it used to

A tidy second brain used to just save you time. But if your boss pays you eight hours a day, you don’t give a crap about that. But since the adoption of AI in almost every company, it is more essential than ever. AI is only as good as the context you hand it, and most people hand it nothing, so they get the same generic answer everyone else gets. The person who’s kept their own notes and client context in a system they can actually pull from feeds the machine something nobody else has. Your organised knowledge becomes the thing that makes your AI output yours instead of everybody’s.

Start with one app. Brain dump first, structure second. And the next time you know you saved something, you’ll find it.