How I'm Using Claude Code + Obsidian to Build a Personal Knowledge Management System That Actually Sticks

I've been bad at taking notes for basically my entire life.

That's not for lack of trying. I've gone through Evernote, Apple Notes, Notion, a previous Obsidian stint—you name it. Each time, I'd set something up, get excited, and then slowly abandon it. Looking back, I think I know why: I always got completely bogged down in the organizational piece. How do I structure this? What folder does this go in? Should this be a tag or a category? Before I knew it, organizing the system had become the hobby, not actually using it.

So I stopped trying to organize it myself.

The Setup

I've got an Obsidian vault, and I've got Claude Code living inside it. Instead of spending energy on taxonomy and structure, I just dump my thoughts in—and let Claude Code handle the management layer. It uses WikiLinks and taxonomies to connect notes together, surface relationships I wouldn't have seen on my own, and pull insights out of things that felt disconnected when I wrote them. The retrieval piece is huge too. Instead of remembering where I filed something, I can just ask.

It works with my brain instead of against it.

The Workflow (First Draft)

I'm still getting started here, but this is what I'm building toward:

Morning commute — brain dump. Everything on my mind gets into a note. All of it. No organization, no filtering. Then I upload that note into Claude Code using a skill that processes it and puts the right information in the right places in my graph. The friction of organizing is gone. I just capture.

During the day — synthesis. A separate skill looks at what I've been talking about recently—the threads, the recurring themes, the things that connect—and generates a document. Think of it like a conversation outline built from my own notes.

Evening commute — conversation. Claude pulls that document from Google Drive and we talk through it. Not just what I said in the morning, but the connections to everything else in the system. It's like interviewing myself, except Claude has done the prep work to make it actually interesting.

Morning is capture. Daytime is processing. Evening is reflection and discovery. That's the loop.

Open Questions

I'm still figuring some things out. The two big ones on my mind:

What's the best way to structure notes in Obsidian for this kind of workflow? I have some instincts, but I want to research how other people have approached it—things like Zettelkasten, Evergreen notes, and other frameworks that have tackled the connection problem.

And more broadly: what are the best practices for reinforcement? Capturing and connecting notes is one thing, but actually retaining and using the knowledge is a different challenge. That's the piece most people skip, and I don't want to.