Transcription
So, Agentic AI has completely changed the second brain concept in 2026, whether that's in Notion or anywhere else. It's wild what I'm doing differently in just a month. A digital second brain is not just about how you organize your notes and business anymore. It's about connecting your knowledge, context, and workspaces to agentic help that actually helps you think, plan, and work.
I'm going to show you exactly how mine works in Notion and give you my top three tips for using Notion and Claude in the AI era. And then after that, I'll share a simple framework I used to set it all up. And as for your local workspace, well, that's where Claude Co-work is becoming my secret weapon on Mac as the perfect companion to my notion setup. And I've got to show you.
But first, well, make sure you subscribe to this new second channel. And we all need to understand why this matters at all. I've been building second brain systems in notion for years. I call mine OS operating systems. Whether that's notion life OS or my business OS, the full system that I currently run better creating in. In fact, we're developing a new template for you guys called the Aentic Business OS coming up very soon. The idea is the same though. all of your context, tasks, projects, goals, notes, knowledge, and processes connected and ready to be used.
Now, for a long time, that was enough. In the last year or so, the idea of manually organizing and importing our own knowledge and ideas changed dramatically with Agentic AI and how Notion has transformed with Notion agents. It's not just a chatbot bolted on. You can actually create yourself specialist agents like I have in here that can read your databases, understand your context, and help you make better decisions.
The problem is most people are either stuck with a messy workspace and no idea how to use AI with it, or they're chasing every new tool without a system underneath. If you're one of those, let me know which. Both end up in the same place, though. Overwhelmed, scattered information, and getting general results.
So, what I'm going to show you today is exactly how I'm using Notion right now. Not only as my business OS setup and the essential systems and databases that are in there, including brains for my agents, but also how I'm then connecting that into an agent management system, AI agent specialists that work with me. And it's way easier to set up than you'd think.
So, here's what my setup actually looks like. Now, the modern agentic second brain. I've got two systems working in parallel. Notion life OS or in my case my business OS which is really an adapted version of my notion life OS template. So I have task lists that I can manage within here. Uh I can track my metrics. We've got projects where we can track the status of projects with reports within them. I've got knowledge and uh research. So a knowledge base full of books and quotations research sets from AI that I've brought in. This is all my kind of working knowledge. Then of course team resources that's internal knowledge like automation documentation, customer service, knowledge management, databases, uh lots and lots of kind of info that can be connected together.
Probably one of the best things to use in notion which I'm adding into my systems is a dedicated notes and meetings database. This means that I can start a new meeting and then immediately I'm able to transcribe it using AI meeting nodes. If it's personal, it might include things like life areas where you can organize filtered views of what you need. It might also be where you journal and use templates to quickly set yourself up with new questions to follow and get insights using charts, buttons to quickly make life easy, and navigation menus that help you work through all of the contents.
So, that's my life OS or business OS. Here's what's changed. I've connected my business OS to something called agent OS, a set of specialist AI coaches. If we jump into the instructions of the templated system I've got, it's a mode picker which works with personal agent where you personalize your agent and give it instructions. This then allows you to work with a series of specialist coaches.
So once we've got our life OS, whatever that is, and your agent system, whatever that is, you can connect them. Once you've set your instructions page, you can within that page add a database reference table. I've just created a simple table and inside it I am at mentioning all the databases that link to my system. So, for example, I could go at habits and link to my daily habits database and it's referenced. That's it. Once you've done that, you kind of know that it's going to work. I've got my wealth and entrepreneurship hub here, my content strategy hub here. They're all linked in, and you're able to work with them.
And one little trick that you might all want to remember when you're creating your own agent instruction guides is to use an anti- AI writing style guide. I basically looked up AI writing style Wikipedia. You'll find a massive document. Paste it into agent OS or agent and ask it to create an instruction to avoid these types of writing. Completely transforms how your agent writes.
So, this is, I think, the leading paid agent personalization template on the notion marketplace. And I think it's because we got in early with a really clever solution that has remained useful, and that is a multiode picker. This system essentially when you ask it a question in here will pick the correct mode and respond with it. And there's a bunch of them in here. We've got a decision-making coach when you want to make a decision or a productivity coach, when you want to work through task management, and it follows certain frameworks. We've even got a meta agent that helps you write your own agent instructions where you can create new specialists using the button here. You just get the specialist to help you fill this out and it all works within the system.
in my system. If I click into my instructions, you'll see there's a lot more going on here. I've got 12 modes, although to be fair, a bunch of these are ridiculous, like entertainer and satist. But for example, I've built myself a wealth and entrepreneurship coach that will literally teach me using its own knowledge base. So, if I simply open up a chat, select a model I want to work with, and say, "How can you help me with my entrepreneurship?" It should select the mode and talk to me about it and use that knowledge base in order to help me. And what's really cool is in my systems, I ask it to offer ways that it can help. All of these modes relate to that. So, for example, using whisper flow to dictate the best trick you'll ever have with an agent. Let's go into mode 12, wealth and entrepreneurship, and I'd like to think about how best to save and set up my money. So you can see it's searching the knowledge base, querying that database. And if I wanted to do the same with my existing context, my projects systems, I can ask and it helps. And what's really cool is it's using MJ Demarco's fast lane principles that I've worked into my system and it's suggesting how I can build a two system approach, a business system and a money system. Look, it's even referencing what I do. And you can see it knows that I have courses, templates. then I can think about wider money management. Really, really cool. So, this is the kind of focused response that you want and it's only possible with the context of notion and building out these specialist modes.
So, if you want this kind of specialist agentic help in your notion workspace, this is how to set it up. You'll need some form of home, a place where you build out your dashboard and then a set of system databases that you know are your key databases. then you're going to need some form of master Notion AI setup. You can download agent OS from the notion marketplace as the quickest way to do this if you want to or you can build your own depending on your skill level. But it's pretty simple once you have these two systems, a set of databases and an agent management system.
Your plan is a business plan or above. That's the only thing that will give you access to notion agent. This is different to Notion AR. You need the agent functionality. Once you have that, you'll then have the option to not only use personal agent by clicking in the bottom right, clicking personalize, and adding your system instructions to it, but you'll also have access to custom agents, which allow you to automate specific workflows and have them run independently, such as Walt, my weekly briefer that runs every Monday at 7:00 a.m.
Even better, my local files and workflow between Notion and my computer have become unbelievably powerful and seamless just by embracing Claude Co-work. This is the Claude Mac desktop app. We've got the usual chat, but then we've got access to co-work and code where I'm building out a workspace for my Agentic Business Accelerator program. But co-work is the one that's really worth checking out. It's might be the biggest impact I've seen on my work this month. And in the month alone, it's changed how I use Notion and get things done. So, get subscribe for a video on that shortly. It's made importing information into Notion an absolute breeze. You can go into connectors and just connect Notion. And within that, I've then got a view of what I'll allow it to do. You've got lots and lots of permissions, granularity, and look at this. It can create things in Canva, check my emails and Gmail, talk to places where I'm building websites. Uh, it can actually run Chrome and use Chrome itself. Most importantly, I have this notion MCP connection that allows it to look through my workspace, add things and take things out. It's easily the best way to get your information into something like a life or business OS in Notion. But more on that on a future video.
So, there you go. a second brain that isn't just storing your information, it's actively helping you use it. Two templates, one workspace connected out of the box. The question is, how do you actually get from where you are now to something more organized like this? Well, I've built a framework for exactly that. It's called the Cassa method or the Cassa framework. Four stages towards a consolidated agentic systems architecture. That's a mouthful. And by the way, this presentation was built by Claude Co-work based on my script from notion.
What this is doing is solving this problem. Scattered information, no context for your agents or chat bots and generic output from the agents or AI that you do engage. This is what a lot of people experience. And from the questionnaire that people have been filling out, 60% have reported overwhelm by their scattered information. The number one response is they don't have a clear path towards building this context. And 46% of you want agents but struggle to know where to start. This is the solution. Consolidate, architect, systematize, and activate. This is how you get to an agentic business.
Consolidate. Gather everything into one place. Most people's information lives across 10 different tools. Notes here, tasks there, goals somewhere else. The first step is getting it all connected into one workspace. That's what something like an agentic business OS or my life OS is designed for.
Next, architect. This shapes the system to your business. It's about working out how you want to build out a workspace that makes things frictionless, understandable for you and your teammates, and structured so that AI can actually help you. things like custom templates, a proper meeting note system, team dashboards with personalized views.
Systematize. Set up your agent instructions. Write SOPs both for humans, but also for agent steps. This is about how the human in the loop engages with the system, but also when and where to use agents, not just using it ridiculously whenever you want. You need to think what is best done by agents and automations and what should we my team I be doing the creative thinking decision-making leadership and also then, you know, what are your workflow plans that allow you to build end-to-end processes that consider effective thoughtful AI processes and this is where agent OS comes in it gives you the coaching layer to do all of this stuff and finally we want to activate deploy your agent start chatting to your coach which is set up your first custom agent. This is where it gets really exciting, but only because you did those first three stages and built the architecture and context around things. The reason most people get inconsistent results from AI, and I hear this all the time, they're prompting without context. They're asking blank chat box to help them with specific life requirements and expecting specific answers. The Cassa method builds the context layer first and that's the difference.
Okay, now you've seen the setup. Let me give you the three things I've learned that make the biggest difference when using notion with AI and agents. These are the tips I wish someone had told me a year ago.
One, structure your workspace for AI, not for you. Now, most people build their notion workspaces so they look nice and make sense to them. And that's fine and you should do that, but at the same time, you want AI to give you useful answers. It needs to be able to read and understand your data. That means connected databases, consistent property names, and information that lives in the right place. So I recommend the first thing you do is consolidate your information into databases that you trust. An example of this is my meeting notes database. So the key to this is that I am using my meeting notes database which collects every single meeting note that I create with an AI summary and a couple of little notes for me and a transcript of the meeting. And most importantly I then link it to a related channel and a related project. It can also relate to the person people that were in it content or companies that I'm working with. This all means that I'm building a network of connections so that if I want to speak to my agent, we can do something like this. We can jump back out, jump into my agent and say, "Please, can you find me all the meetings that I have had in the last year about the great Christmas feast in my meeting notes database?" This is more than a search. By asking the agent, having connected it to my databases and having things like relations and structured information, it's really easy for it to find the meetings. Now, this is a really simple response, but take a look. It now gives me references. And as you can see, they are all references to that production that I run. And if I want, I can jump in and see the information. I'm also able to then go, ah, this isn't very helpful for me right now. I can ask it another question. You'll see it's naturally linked to the page that we're in. What came up in this meeting about how the hosts interact with the audience. And very quickly with a simple question, I get really detailed contextualized answers about what we planned in the meeting. It's super powerful and super quick. And you'll see it's just naturally in mode one because it doesn't relate to any other situations. The same goes for tasks. If your tasks are scattered across five different pages and no connection, your AI agent has nothing to work with. But if your tasks are linked to projects with links to goals, which links to areas of your life, now you can see the full picture, so can your agent. This is something that something like agent OS gives you out the box. connections, clear links, tasks related to projects, projects related to life life areas, and you find your information where you really need it.
So, make sure you subscribe below as well because we're working on something really exciting. This Aentic Business OS that I can't wait to share with you guys. But let me show you another quick demo of how we might use this. This is a meeting I had with my colleague Jacob. After the meeting, I asked the agent to do this. analyze this meeting conversation. Create tasks allocated to either me, L, or Jacob, relate them to the launch frame website project, also make any tasks that we talked about for the Agentic Business Accelerator and add them into my system. Look at what it did. It found 11 website tasks. It allocated them to the right people and linked them to the Frame a website project. And then it went through and found eight tasks for the life OS business OS development and created those. We've got a website design feedback summary page and a detailed summary of this entire meeting. Not only that, if we then go and click into the framer website, you'll see under tasks, we have all of the tasks have that were created dropped in linked to the area of website I didn't ask it to do that allocated to the right people and set up ready to go. It's a totally brilliant system that makes such a difference. That is how you simplify your busy work and all we needed to do in agent OS was make these connections linking our database to the agent system.
Tip two is using AI not as a general chatbot but as specialist coaches. When you open chat GPT or even notion AI and just start typing, you're getting a generalist. It doesn't know your goals, your projects, your style, your constraints. It's guessing. What changed everything for me was creating those focused coaching modes. Each one with specific instructions, specific database access to a knowledge base, and a specific job. Let me show you exactly what I mean with my productivity coach.
So, we're going to go into my agent instructions, and you'll see we've got this essentialist productivity coach. It uses mode 2 system instructions. This is the page it gets directed to. So, why don't we also open a chat window? I really like using Opus since you seem to have unlimited use of it for notion. Pretty amazing for the money. I'd like to work on prioritizing my tasks for next week with my productivity coach, please. So, you see it selects mode two. It's loading calendar tools. It's now checking my active tasks. And while it does that, take a look at the instructions. It's got an overview of who it is, core principles, what it follows, and then most importantly, this I've built a vector database of key ideas and principles that I think a good task management system should have. So, if we click through to that database, you'll see a bunch of different examples. These are all ideas I've collected from across my existing knowledge base. So, the maker manager hybrid week, for example, if we look at this, it's categorized. It's got a content type, strategy, best practice, workflow, review process, and so on and so forth. It's also got a confidence level, so how proven or validated this has been, the key insight that it has, when to apply it, and then the source of where I've taken these things from, from my own knowledge or from other people's books or knowledge, and then when I added it. What this does is it it gives this system a much more focused intelligence. So, if we look at the maker week, you'll see it's broken down in a very structured way. What this is, why it matters, how it works, and boundaries, variations, examples, when to use it. This makes this productivity coach so much more powerful. And let's take a little look at what it's done for us. So, we can see it's taking a look at my week, check my calendar, can see what's going on, and it's saying, well, next Monday I'm super busy. Wednesday is my best mixed day. I'm filming all day on Tuesday and then I've got a funeral on Friday and Thursday is wide open. So, this is my golden deep work day. You can see it's referencing the concept of deep work. That will be There you go. In here, you'll also see that it's got coaching instructions. Before I start recommending where to place thing, I've got a couple of co coaching questions. How are you feeling about your capacity of those overdue finance admin jobs? Are any of these genuinely blocking something else? Content development sprint deadlines. So, what we could do now is say, I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed, but I do know that the Huboc setup is going to be essential and I need to get back to Lars about making tax digital. So, next week we're all set up ready for the new UK financial year. So, this is a little example. Let's put it in and it's going to do a couple of things. This means that it can now draw in its knowledge base and give me advice, but it can also actually take action for me. You then essentially are working with specialist colleagues. This is what I recommend using the notion personal agent for. So, it's blocking my calendar. It's also adding a task for Lars and now it's going to do recommendations for my 8 out of 10 capacity. You've added the calendar event. I can go check this out. There it is. It's dropped in the hub doc setup. It's made it important and urgent. It's then got a reply to L's job written in here. I mean, unbelievable. It just does it. And then if we go back to this page, you'll then see it's created a Q1 priority. Let's open the task. There you go. It's added it to the system. It's made it important and urgent. It's all linked and ready to go. I mean, look at that. Totally brilliant.
Now, I want to show you one more example before we move on to the next step. Probably my favorite use case for my personal agent and that is in terms of how I make content. One of the things that's really difficult to get right is packaging videos. I'm currently reviewing all the latest MacBooks on the better creating channel. I wanted to work out how to package this video. First, I just spoke my plan. Let's plan and then draft a MacBook comparison video. And these are the MacBooks I'm going to be doing this with. The video should be around 10 to 15 minutes long. We should work on packaging first, a really solid sticky hook, and make sure we're delivering on the promise of the title and packaging in the first 20 seconds, so on and so forth. What you can see it's done here is it's had a massive load of information. So, what it's done is it's gone through and gone, right, I need content strategist mode first. It's then loaded a skill in notion. It's loaded scripts. It's then searched a knowledge base for packaging strategies. This knowledge base here where it's looked through my YouTube knowledge database. Probably something in packaging around channel funnel architecture, perfect video packaging, packaging over perfection philosophy, so on and so forth. It's applied these principles from the knowledge base. Come up with a best title, a thumbnail, and a first line spoken. Why it works? It's thinking through why the thumbnail delivers visually and then it's identifying as I ask it to what are the three viewer questions that they might ask and then how it's addressing them and then runner up. What it's done if we now shut this up is I've instructed it just to fill out the database template that I use for creating videos. And you'll see I have a title section. It's dropped in a bunch of title ideas with notes and pick the best ones. thumbnail ideas, the concepts, hook alignment, best paired with titles, ranked text ideas for them, and we could even get it to generate images. In fact, why don't we just do that now? This is awesome. Could you generate an image for thumbnail number one and thumbnail number two as an example packaging image? While it does that, um, we can also take a look at the script. I have a teleprompter script that I've now refined, checked for myself, worked through, and I'm ready to do it. So now, of course, I don't want to do all of this and just have the agent do it for me. But this holds me to account. It makes sure I follow proper systems and structures and and things we know work. And then it allows me to go in and start from a much more finished idea, and I can go and edit it myself, read it out, make sure I'm happy with it. The difference is totally huge. Now, of course, I wouldn't use these as the actual thumbnails, but they're brilliant ways to get a proof of concept. And well, there it is. So, this is a great example of using this to come up with concepts. It's in my brand style. It looks pretty solid, and I genuinely might consider using both, but that's for another video.
Okay, it's time to move on to tip number three, and that is when to automate with custom agents that run on credits and work while you sleep. You can watch my full video on notion custom agents, but I want to show you three that are particularly pleasing to me. So, this is Walt. A custom agent is essentially something that can be set to a trigger. You add them as a new agent here and you can actually just create them by speaking to the agent itself and it will set its own instructions and then you can iterate and refine. You'll see that Walt is triggered every Monday at 7:00 a.m. or when I mention him or start a new chat in this window. These are the instructions we've created. Every morning he sends me an email to hello bettercreating.com with a workflow guideline. He searches my who am I page which gives clear instructions of my business uh my intentions, my career and timeline, my brand overview, social links, all of that. So it understands the context of my business, who my key colleagues are, and a brief writing instruction to know exactly how to write each element of the setup. We then get this every Monday at 7:00 a.m. A weekly brief to my inbox. Here's the one that came uh on the 9th of March. And what you can see is a weekly analysis of the week ahead. We've got this week's priorities, personal recommendations, protect your energy again across the production sprint, things I may have missed. Have a brilliant week, Simon. You've got a lot on, but it's the kind of week where real momentum gets built.
If we now go into our dashboard into settings and into notion AI and we go and click on notion credits, you can see that well it costs quite a lot. 13,000 credits it's about $10 per,000 credits. So it would be about $130 or $130 that I've spent on agents this month. And that's honestly probably quite low for the number of uses I've got. Other people could be spending thousands of pounds. The big response to Notion custom agents has been, "Oh my goodness, they're going to be so expensive." You need to think of these more aligned with what you would pay someone to do the work than a piece of AI software. Custom agents are going to be used for specific automated workflows where you see a true return on investment. For me, a weekly briefer on customer service is probably useful because it's a one-off occurrence. I can set it on a lower cost model and get pretty good results. If you're going to be using it as a customer service triage assistant, it's going to cost you a huge amount. But does that work out better value than hiring another team member? Where do you stand on the idea of hiring versus AI? My feeling is AI should help the people you've already hired do more, do it better, and focus on the stuff they love doing much better.
Anyway, the point is notion agent is broken into two parts. Personal agent that is part of your plan, agent OS and custom agents. Custom agents be really specific about when you run these for the cost. Agent OS remains exactly the same tool and absolutely is worth continuing to use for those custom coaches, those agents that you interact with and chat with.
I'm going to show you one more because this is probably our most useful and powerful agent. This is my customer service weekly analyzer, Andrea. You've got to name them, right? What Andrea does is on a Monday at 9ine, we'll do a complete review of our notion at bettercreating.com inbox where we support all of our life OS, agent OS, and wider icon and template purchases. It's got the context the other one had, and it can search through a feedback hub that we have for agent OS, our product and services knowledge base. Let me show you what it does. It sends a report to a specific database designed for it. If we jump into it, you'll see we got one yesterday for this week. Problem solved. This was all created by the agent, by the way. This template, this uh database was all built by the agent. No longer do you need to know how to build it in in notion. You can get your agent to do it and just refine, be a manager. And if we jump into this view, overall summary, two bits of agents feedback, both five stars. Thank you very much. And people asking about updates in relation to the new custom agents feature. You can see a report that the agent has created, code provided to people. We've got issues, time tracking bug that I'll need to look at, people being confused about personal agent and custom agents and some refund requests. And then also some successes and some nice testimonials. We've also got agent OS feedback here on personal agents and nothing escalated. So a super powerful report, really useful for me when I'm not in that email to stay connected to what you guys are talking about along with my colleagues so that I'm up to date.
So that would be my overview of how to use a life or business OS, a personal agent OS, and custom agents for bespoke specific automated workflows that you want to happen while you sleep. So check out my free guide to get started with this. It's completely free. Will give you everything you need to know. And there's a questionnaire linked to it where you can tell me what else you need from me. And then we've got currently life OS and agent OS you can download via the better creating.com website. And when you download that free guide, you'll be put on a list so I let you know about my agentic business OS resources and templates coming soon. And if you want to dive deeper into each stage, I'm going to build an agentic business accelerator, a full program that will help you implement the entire Cassa method step by step. Details are coming later this year, and you can watch that next video on using the Cassa framework and building an agentic business right here. I'll see you on the next one. Bye.