I keep my whole life in a folder of text files. The part that makes it work is that I almost never have to organize it myself.
What it actually is
Obsidian is a free app for taking notes. Under the hood, every note is a plain text file sitting in one folder on my computer. There is no database and no locked-up format. I can open any note in any text editor, today or in ten years.
On top of that folder I added two helpers. The first is a set of small jobs that run on a timer, the way an alarm clock goes off at the same time each day. The second is Claude, the AI assistant I use, acting as a librarian. The timed jobs collect raw material. Claude reads it and files it into the right place. My job is to talk and to read.
A place to dump my brain, from any device
The first piece is a daily journal. One page, wiped clean every morning, where I write or talk through whatever is rattling around. Plans, worries, half-formed ideas, things people told me on a call.
It sticks because I can reach it from anywhere. I use Obsidian Sync, so the exact same notes show up on my laptop, my iPad, and my phone. A thought hits me on a walk, I pull out my phone, and I dump it.
On my phone I talk instead of type. The built-in iPhone dictation was rough enough that I would give up halfway through a sentence. I switched to Wispr Flow and it changed how much I capture. It keeps pace with how I actually speak, so I can ramble for two minutes and get back clean text. The effort to save a thought dropped to almost nothing, so now I save everything.
And because every entry is plain text in one folder, finding it later takes one search. A stray idea from March surfaces the moment I search for it in June.
My meetings write themselves up
This is my favorite part. I use Granola, an app that records and transcribes my calls in the background. Every evening one of the timed jobs collects the day's transcripts and hands them to Claude. Claude reads the full conversation and writes a clean summary: what we decided, the things I committed to, who got mentioned, and links to the people and projects involved. It keeps the word-for-word transcript too, in case I want the exact quote.
I do none of that. I hang up the phone, and by the next morning there is a tidy write-up waiting, already wired into everything else I know about that person and that project.
A morning brief that runs my day
The second job I lean on fires at 7 a.m. and builds a single page called my Daily Brief. It pulls from everywhere at once: today's calendar, my unread messages with replies already drafted, the email worth my attention, my open tasks, and the follow-ups I promised on yesterday's calls.
I open my laptop and that brief is the first thing on the screen. I know what is coming, what I owe people, and what to chase, before I finish my coffee.
It gets better the longer I use it
Every meeting note, journal entry, and brief links to the others. Mention a person and the note connects to their page. Mention a project and it ties back in. So the web of connections grows on its own, and old notes keep resurfacing exactly when they are useful. Knowledge I captured weeks ago shows up next to the thing I am working on today, without me going to look for it.
What it is like to use every day
The best part is what I no longer do. I do not sort notes, because the filing happens for me. I do not write up meetings, because they arrive summarized while I sleep. When a thought lands, I capture it in ten seconds and trust that it will find its way back to me.
The whole thing runs in the background overnight, so I wake up to finished pages instead of a chore list. It runs on the Claude subscription I already pay for, so there is no per-task meter ticking away while I use it.
None of it locks me in. The notes are plain text files I own, in one folder. If I walked away from any of these apps tomorrow, every note would still open in anything that reads text. That portability is the reason I am comfortable putting my entire life in here.
What I would add next
The one upgrade on my list is a simple alert if a morning job ever fails without saying so, so I catch it the same day. Small fix. Everything else, I plan to keep feeding and let it compound.