Build Your Brain in Notion
10 min readThe structured, AI-ready version of your company brain. The workspace layout, what goes in each section, and how to connect it to Claude so it becomes live context for every skill.
Notion is the easiest place to start your brain, especially for anything a client or team will touch.
The fastest way: let Claude build it for you
You don't have to create any of this by hand. Connect the Notion MCP, then paste one prompt · Claude scaffolds the whole brain, interviews you, fills your About Me, and writes your CLAUDE.md.
claude mcp add --transport http notion https://mcp.notion.com/mcpYou're setting up my brain · my company's second brain · in Notion. You have the Notion MCP connected. Build it in three passes and don't rush the interview.
PASS 1 · Interview me. Ask these one at a time and wait for each answer:
1. What does my business do, and how does it make money?
2. Who are my current clients or the people I serve?
3. What's my tech stack · the tools I use every day?
4. How do I like to communicate? Tone, hard do's and don'ts. Paste me 2-3 lines of your actual writing so I can match your voice.
5. What are your top 3 priorities right now?
PASS 2 · Using the Notion MCP, create a top-level page "Brain" with these sub-pages:
About Me · Active Projects · Clients · Processes · Knowledge · Meeting Notes · Pipeline.
Fill in "About Me" from my answers under these headers: Who I Am · What I Do · My Stack · My Voice · Active Priorities · Clients · Hard Rules. Be specific · a vague About Me produces vague sessions. Seed each other page with a one-line description of what belongs there.
PASS 3 · Generate a CLAUDE.md that mirrors the About Me page: under 150 lines, written as a teaching document for a new employee who remembers everything forever. Print it in full so I can paste it into my global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, and tell me exactly where that file lives.Everything below is what that prompt builds. Skim it so you can tweak the structure and know what lives where · or build it by hand if you'd rather own every step.
Why Notion over a folder of docs
Most people store knowledge in folders. Folders are archives · things go in, you mostly never find them again. The problem isn't the content, it's that there's no structure Claude can navigate.
Notion is different for three reasons:
1. It's structured by default. Every page has a title, properties, and a hierarchy. Claude searches it semantically via MCP and actually finds what it's looking for.
2. AI is built in. Notion AI can search, summarise, and query your workspace natively. Combined with the Notion MCP, you have two layers of AI working with the same knowledge.
3. It's collaborative. A Notion Brain isn't only yours · your team or a client can read and write to it too. It becomes a shared system, not a private notebook.
The structure
Keep it simple. The goal is that any SkillTree skill can find the relevant context in under ten seconds.
Your Brain
├── 📌 About Me ← who you are, your business, your stack
├── 💼 Active Projects ← what you're currently working on
├── 👥 Clients ← one page per client, all context lives here
├── 🛠️ Processes ← your SOPs, how you do things
├── 📚 Knowledge ← things you've learned, notes, resources
├── 📅 Meeting Notes ← every call logged here
└── 💰 Pipeline ← deals and opportunitiesThis is the minimum. The exact structure matters less than the rule behind it: every type of information has a home, and those homes get used consistently.
What goes in each section
About Me
The source of truth for your CLAUDE.md. Write it as if you're explaining yourself to a new employee who needs to understand your business in ten minutes. Update it when things change. Include:
- What your business does and how it makes money
- Your current focus and priorities
- Your tech stack
- How you prefer to work and communicate
- Your key relationships · clients, partners, team
The About Me skeleton (paste, then fill it in)
This is the exact shape your CLAUDE.md mirrors. Specific beats clever · a vague About Me produces vague sessions.
# [Your Name] · Business Context
## Who I Am
[Name, role, business in 2 sentences]
## What I Do
[Business model, clients, revenue]
## My Stack
[Tools you use daily]
## My Voice
[Communication style · with 2-3 examples of your actual writing]
## Active Priorities
[Top 3 focus areas this week/month]
## Clients
[Current clients with status and key context]
## Hard Rules
[Things Claude should never do or always do]Active Projects
One page per project. Each page carries:
- What it is and why it exists
- Current status and next action
- Key decisions made and why
- Open questions
- Links to relevant files or conversations
Claude reads this when you ask it to help with a project. The more context here, the better the output.
Clients
One page per client, treated like a dossier:
- Company overview and what they do
- Key contacts and their roles
- What you've built or are building
- Deal history and current engagement
- Meeting notes (link from the Meeting Notes section)
- Important decisions and context
Processes
Your SOPs · how you do things, written simply so Claude can follow them. How you run a discovery call, onboard a client, structure a proposal, deploy a build. When Claude knows your processes, it stops reinventing the wheel every session.
Knowledge
Anything you want to remember and retrieve later · articles, frameworks, notes from conversations. Keep titles descriptive so semantic search can find them.
Meeting Notes
Every call, logged. Process the transcript after each call and drop it into a new page. Title format: [Client/Topic] · [Date]. Over time this becomes the institutional memory of your business.
Pipeline
Every active deal with current status, last contact, and next step. Connect it to your CRM via MCP if you want Claude to update it automatically.
Connecting your Brain to Claude
Once Notion is set up, the Notion MCP makes it live context for every session.
claude mcp add --transport http notion https://mcp.notion.com/mcpNow Claude can read and write to your entire workspace. The highest-leverage thing you can do with it is a morning briefing prompt:
Read my Active Projects page, my Pipeline, and my calendar for today.
Give me a briefing: what's most important today, who am I talking to,
what do I need to prepare, and what's overdue.That's your entire day in context in thirty seconds.
Once that briefing prompt works, it's the seed of a SkillTree DASHBOARD · a command center that runs it for you instead of you typing it. The Brain is the data layer; the dashboards are the front end that reads it.
Make your skills read it · the bridge
The Notion MCP lets you pull Notion into a chat. But the SkillTree skills you install don't read Notion · they read a local knowledge/ folder (company.md, voice.md, offer.md, stack.md). That's deliberate: skills run fast against plain files, not a live API.
So there's one bridge to run. The Brain Sync skill pulls your Notion Brain down into that knowledge/ folder · it maps each Notion section to the right file, shows you a diff, and writes only what you approve. Edit in Notion, run sync, and every skill you deploy reads the current truth.
Make it a reflex: change a price or a client in Notion → run "sync my brain" → your skills quote the new price the next time you run them. That's the loop that makes "install a skill and it already knows my business" literally true.
The habit that makes it compound
The Brain only works if you feed it. The minimum viable rhythm:
- After every call: process the transcript, log it to Notion.
- After every decision: add a note to the relevant project or client page.
- Weekly: spend fifteen minutes reviewing active projects, updating statuses, archiving what's done.
None of this takes long. Skip it for two weeks and your skills start working from stale context.
The same architecture scales to more than one person. A group brain replaces your CLAUDE.md with a GROUP-CLAUDE.md that maps each member's expertise (not bios · lenses: what each person is the authority on and how they think), the conventions everyone shares, and the decisions the group has ruled out together. Every member's Claude reads it, and every session anyone runs feeds the same graph. It's the multiplayer version of everything in this module · worth knowing it exists, but build your own brain solid first.