Second‑brain for FP&A
Experts and productivity posts again promoted building a 'second brain'—capturing meeting insights, frameworks and DAX snippets in a tagged digital vault to speed future analysis and onboarding. The suggested routine: summarize 'why' and 'now what' after exec meetings, tag by KPI (#margin, #workingcapital) and link to model versions. (x.com)
Tiago Forte’s CODE (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express) and PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) frameworks are the foundation most practitioners cite when converting meeting captures into a reusable “second brain.” (fortelabs.com) The compact recap format framed as “What / So What / Now What” (also called What‑So‑What‑Now) is the explicit structure experts recommend for executive meeting outputs, and one case study showed the method cut meeting time by about 30% while improving clarity. (intrinsicagility.org) Applying tagging conventions — e.g., KPI tags like #margin or #workingcapital — is a standard practice in PKM tools such as Obsidian and in KPI meeting templates like Craft’s KPI meeting notes to make cross‑meeting retrieval and dashboards possible. (practicalpkm.com) DAX and Power Query snippets are commonly stored in shared repositories (examples: PowerBI‑tips’ DAX‑Templates gallery and community GitHub snippet collections) with usage notes so analysts can drop validated measures into models instead of re‑engineering logic each time. (github.com) Linking each meeting capture to a specific model version is now practicable: Power BI’s semantic model version history (Premium), Tabular Editor + Git workflows for source control, and TMDL/code‑first model views let teams tie decisions to exact dataset snapshots. (databear.com) Automating model documentation (for example using DAX INFO functions with Power Automate) captures measure metadata and usage notes for each version, while PKM benchmarks show graph‑based second‑brain retrieval can surface results in under 20 seconds versus minutes with traditional folders. (vahiddm.com) Practical FP&A note schema adopted by leading teams includes: meeting date and attendees, “Why” (root driver and metric impacted such as Gross Margin % or Working Capital days), “Now What” (owner, action and deadline), and a direct link to the model/report version — a pattern that mirrors FP&A KPI playbooks that prioritize revenue, margin and working capital as core review metrics. (tldv.io)
