One folder of plain-text notes that holds the whole business — and that Claude reads and files into, which turned out to be the load-bearing part.
What is it?
An Obsidian vault: markdown files in folders, git underneath, synced every 15 minutes whether or not the app is open
Every client, project, decision, invoice, call transcript and half-thought gets filed into it — there’s a filing map, an index per project tree, and a weekly lint job that catches drift
It’s also on my phone via claude.ai, same repo, so I can ask it things from a park bench
The role reversal
It started as my notebook. At some point it quietly became Claude’s backend — I rarely open Obsidian now, I just ask (‘what did we decide about pricing’, ‘pull up the Huw invoices’) and the right note comes back
Because the context lives in files rather than in any one conversation, several Claude sessions can run at once and each picks up exactly where that project left off
Image: the Skyrim-style map of the vault I made for a client
What feeds it
Mostly automations, honestly: the daily diary entry, the twice-daily business briefing, call transcripts, Apple Notes migrating in overnight, a log of every book I convert for the e-readers
I put surprisingly little in by hand — a knowledge base you have to maintain manually dies, this one runs on exhaust