Most advice about taking notes falls apart at the same spot. Saving something is easy — you drop a link, a voice memo, or a half-formed thought into a folder and move on. Going back later to make sense of it is the hard part: reading it again, pulling out what matters, filing it where you’ll find it, and connecting it to what you already know. That second step is the one almost nobody does, and it’s where most note-taking habits quietly fall apart.

My fix is a pair of tools. Obsidian is where my notes live — a simple app that stores everything as plain text files on my computer. Claude is the assistant that keeps those files in order, like a librarian who reshelves and cross-references everything I bring in. Here’s how the two work together. (For how I use Claude beyond my notes, see How I Use Claude.)

Setting It Up From Scratch

I started with an almost empty app. Rather than build out folders by hand, one at a time, I had Claude set up the whole structure for me: a clean set of top-level folders for active projects, ongoing responsibilities, reference material, and finished work. It built a home page to use as my starting point, set up index pages that automatically list what’s inside each area so I don’t have to maintain those lists myself, spelled out what each long-term area is for, and created a daily-journal template that fills in the date and pulls up my open tasks.

The single most useful thing it made wasn’t a note at all. It was a short instructions file that tells Claude, every time we work together, who I am, where everything lives, and how I want it to behave. That one file is the reason the system stays consistent instead of drifting a little every time I sit down to use it.

Turning Raw Notes Into Useful Ones

The real day-to-day payoff is in processing. When I hand Claude something raw — an article, a rough idea, a transcript — it doesn’t just paste it somewhere and call it done. It first saves the untouched original as a backup copy. Then it breaks the material into small, single-idea notes, each written so it makes sense on its own without the original sitting next to it. Every note gets put in the right folder, labeled using words I already use elsewhere instead of inventing new ones, linked to related notes already in my collection, and pointed back to where it came from.

What I get back isn’t a pile of clippings I’ll never open again. It’s a connected set of ideas where clicking a link actually takes me somewhere worth going. The tedious middle step that usually kills this kind of system — the gap between saving something and actually working it in — is exactly the part Claude takes off my hands.

Keeping Things Findable

The slow death of any note collection is messy labels: ten slightly different tags for the same idea, until nothing turns up when you search for it. Because Claude works from a fixed list of labels and reuses what’s already there instead of making up new ones on a whim, the labeling stays consistent over time. When something genuinely doesn’t fit anywhere, the rule is simple — it stops and asks me rather than forcing the note into the wrong place or quietly creating a new folder. That restraint is what keeps the whole thing trustworthy.

Cleaning Up the Mess

It’s not all about creating new notes. Some of the most useful work has been tidying up. Early on I asked a basic question — what am I actually working on right now? — and the honest answer was that I couldn’t tell, because most of my projects had no status marked. Claude pulled the real picture straight from the files: dozens of projects, only a handful clearly active, and a long tail of finished work that should have been filed away. Then it helped me sort them into active, on hold, and done, and fixed the labels so my home page finally showed the truth.

That’s a pattern I keep coming back to. A collection of notes only tells you the truth about itself when something reads across all of it at once, and Claude is good at being that reader.

Keeping Track of Projects

Projects get more structure than the rest of my notes, because there are a lot of them and they change week to week. Each project is its own page with a few labeled fields at the top — its status, who it’s for, when it’s due, how urgent it is. Once those labels are filled in, the project more or less files itself, because two of Obsidian’s add-on features — called Bases and Dataview — read those labels and do the rest.

Bases works like a spreadsheet that builds itself. I set it up once as a single board, and it reads every project’s labels and lays them out for me: a card view grouped by status that works like a simple task board, plus tables that gather all the open tasks, ideas, and bugs across everything at once. I never type these l

  • obsidian
  • claude
  • note-taking