The AI Second Brain That Fixed My Research Chaos: Cluing Review
Drowning in tabs, bookmarks, and screenshots? Here's how I use Cluing, an AI second brain, to capture, organize, and actually use what I save.
Today’s article is sponsored by Cluing, which had no influence over the content. I tested it and wrote about it the way I do with every tool.
One of the most frequent questions I’ve received since I started this newsletter a year ago is how to save the things you read online so you can find them again when you need them.
It’s the core problem an AI second brain is supposed to solve — a system outside your head that captures, organizes, and surfaces information the moment you need it.
I remember at some point in the beginning I told one of you about using bookmarks to save links. Then I moved to Notion and built a Telegram personal assistant that could save every new idea or finding in there. I tried Obsidian for a couple of weeks but couldn’t stick with it. Most days I still end up in Apple Notes (where I’m using a Cowork scheduled task to resurface weekly what I'd saved), and I use NotebookLM when I need to dig into research and make sense of it.
None of it fully solves the problem, and I know it’s not just me.
We all consume more information than we can process. And we are all drowning in ideas we find interesting but never do anything with, because we forget to save things, we can’t find them when we do, and even when we find them, we can’t easily connect our research to the rest of what we know.
What I need is to save an article, a quote, a video, a post, right there, in the moment, inside the app where I found it. Have it organized easily. And when I need it later, find it in seconds.
That’s what a digital second brain should do. It remembers things you forgot you saved, and connects information across sources in ways you wouldn’t on your own.
So when Cluing reached out, I was very curious to test it.
Meet Cluing
Cluing captures insights from everywhere you already read and watch (PDFs, Kindle, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, Google Docs, Gmail), keeps them organized, and lets you use AI to make sense of everything you’ve saved.
It comes as a browser extension, a mobile app, and a desktop app.
Save a LinkedIn or Instagram post from your phone or computer into a collection.
Highlight a paragraph from any webpage or PDF on your computer.
Open your dashboard to see everything you’ve collected and use AI to connect it all.
And today I’ll walk you through how I used Cluing to research and write an article from start to finish, so you can see how it works in practice.
Stay until the end, because I’ll also share a resource I created with all the best free AI courses currently available.
And by the way, paid AI blew my mind subscribers get an exclusive 20% discount on Cluing. The code is on the Premium Perks page, use it at checkout.
In this article:
How Cluing organizes your second brain using the PARA method
How I used Cluing to research and write an article (step by step)
How Cluing organizes your second brain using the PARA method
The first thing you see when you open Cluing is that everything is organized using a framework called PARA: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive. It’s a system created by Tiago Forte that gives every piece of information a place to live.
Here’s how it works:
Projects are the things you’re actively working on, with a clear beginning and end. Building a website, preparing a pitch, researching a new tool. Everything related to that work lives in one project. When it’s done, you archive it.
Areas are the parts of your life or work that never really end. Marketing, sales, health, leadership. Whenever you come across something useful about one of your areas, you save it there so it’s ready when you need it.
Resources are curated reference libraries. Notes from a course, a breakdown of a podcast, takeaways from a conference. Things you pull from repeatedly and share with others.
Archive is how you keep everything clean without losing anything. When a project is done or a resource isn’t current anymore, you move it to the archive. It’s out of your active view, but still searchable.
But the best way to see how this works is through real examples. So let me show you how I’ve been using it.
How I used Cluing to research and write an article (step by step)
The best way to show you what Cluing does is to walk you through how I used it. So here’s the workflow behind an article I was working on in the past few days.
Together with Rich Carr, I was writing a piece for his publication Brain-Centric about how the way we talk to AI (the tone, the emotions, the frustration or enthusiasm in our prompts) influences what it gives back, inspired by Anthropic's latest research.
So I created a project in Cluing and started collecting.
Save highlights from any webpage
First, I went to Anthropic’s main research paper, selected a passage I wanted to remember. One click, and it was saved as a snippet inside my new project.
Then I found a few quotes and key ideas on their research page that I wanted to keep. I selected the text, highlighted it (just like you would with a marker), and saved it. Everything landed in the same project. And whenever I revisit that page from the Cluing dashboard, my highlights are still there.
Highlight and save insights from PDFs
I also had an older research paper (a PDF) on how being polite versus rude in your prompts affects AI performance. I uploaded it into Cluing’s Reader, highlighted the ideas that mattered the same way as on the web page, and saved them under the same project. And again, whenever I revisit it in Cluing, all my highlights are right there.
Save your open tabs so you can finally close them
Since I was already in the dashboard, I added a few other resources I had open in my tabs as links. Just saving them in my project so they’re all in one place and I can finally close all those tabs.
Save articles (or posts from LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and YouTube) on Mobile
While I was still gathering my thoughts, two relevant articles dropped. Dr Sam Illingworth wrote about the 171 emotion-like patterns Anthropic found inside Claude and how they drive behaviors like sycophancy and deception. Karen Spinner took a more practical angle: she ran 250 API calls to test whether Claude’s “desperation” signal when running low on tokens shows up in its outputs.
I was reading both on my phone. So I just tapped the share button, selected the Cluing app, and saved the link. Done.
Expand your research with built-in AI web search
I could also add extra sources by using the built-in web search and looking for things related to my topic. More research, same project.
See all your research in one place
At this point, all my research for this article was in one project. PDFs, web highlights, links, mobile saves, everything.
I could revisit it all, share it with Rich so we could expand on the research together, or just start writing.
Use AI to turn your research into a finished draft
After writing my draft, I went to Cluing’s AI chat and asked it to review what I wrote based on my research project.
It pointed out things I could improve, connections I missed, and ideas from my saved sources that I hadn’t used yet.
But this workflow works for a lot more than articles, so let me give you some ideas for how you can use it in your own work.
6 more ways to use Cluing in your daily work
Here are some ideas across different areas of work.
If you’re learning about sales, save the best articles, frameworks, and videos you find into an area. When you’re writing a pitch or a proposal, bring that area into Cluing’s AI chat and have it apply what you’ve collected to your draft.
If you work on a marketing team and you’re collecting campaign ideas and inspiration, share the project with your team. Everyone adds to it, and when it’s time to plan, everything is in one place.
If you’re studying a topic like SEO, build an area for it over time. Every article, course, or tip you save goes there. Then when you’re writing a blog post, bring your SEO area into the AI chat along with your draft, and it will tell you exactly what to improve based on the tips you’ve collected.
If you’re a consultant and you research industries or clients before calls, create a project per client. Save company pages, LinkedIn posts, news articles, relevant reports. Walk into every meeting prepared.
If you manage a team, collect onboarding resources, processes, and useful references into a shared area. New hires get access to everything instead of asking the same questions.
If you’re planning a trip, a renovation, or any personal project, save inspiration, guides, reviews, and bookmarks in one place. No more screenshots scattered across five apps.
And like I did below, you can collect resources that could be useful for people in your team or your community and share them with a single link.
My free AI courses collection (built inside Cluing)
I created for you a resource in Cluing with the best free AI courses currently available, including courses from Anthropic, MIT, Google, IBM, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Hugging Face, and Microsoft.
It's open to everyone and you can share it with friends who want to get started with AI or level up.
Your turn
If you’ve been struggling with the same problem I described, give Cluing a try. It’s free to start, and it takes about two minutes to install the extension and save your first idea.
What I like about it is that it’s simple. You save things where you find them, you highlight what matters so you don’t have to re-read entire pages or PDFs later, and everything ends up in one place.
And remember, paid AI blew my mind subscribers get an exclusive 20% discount. The code is on the Premium Perks page, use it at checkout.
What would you use it for first? I’d love to hear.
And if you know someone who’s drowning in tabs, bookmarks, and notes scattered everywhere, share this with them.
This post is free. Paid subscribers get access to all premium prompts and tools inside Amplifiers (the AI blew my mind MCP), weekly premium articles, all premium resources inside the AI blew my mind Lab, and exclusive partner discounts like Cluing. Upgrade here.
I find this incredibly helpful. Any tool that can track and record our daily activities reduces cognitive load. I wonder if there’s a feature where we can integrate some of these projects and automatically index them? I believe you mentioned that you could do that, Daria.
Daria, Thank you. I shall use Cluing today and let you know. Best regards/ds