A few weeks ago Steve went to tidy his notes and accidentally proved the entire thesis of the business we're building. I want to tell you what happened, because the mistake he caught himself making is the same one I watch capable people make with their whole lives, and it's worth seeing up close.
I'll hand over to him to tell it, then I'll come back to the part that matters for you.
Steve:
I'd been avoiding it for most of a year. My notes were a mess. Not the charming kind that hides a working system underneath, the other kind, where you open the place you keep your thinking and feel a small drop in your stomach.
That matters more than it sounds. I run several businesses, I advise others on theirs, and a lot of what I'm paid for lives in my head and in my files. When the files drift, the head follows. You start keeping things in your inbox, your memory, and forty open tabs, which is a polite way of saying you've stopped keeping them at all.
So I decided to sort it out. I use Obsidian, a plain-text notes app a lot of operators swear by. Rather than spend a weekend reading other people's setups, I asked Claude to take a look at the whole thing.
What came back was more useful, and less comfortable, than I expected. Claude told me, with more tact than I deserved, that my vault was a partial, drifted blend of three different organising methods, stacked on top of each other, none of them finished. A third of one, a third of another, a third of a third. No wonder opening it felt like walking into a room where the furniture had been arranged by three people who'd never met.
Then it drafted a plan to fix it. Pick one method, commit, migrate everything across. The plan was sound. I was a click away from approving it and letting it run.
And I stopped, because something was nagging at me.
Why had I blended three systems in the first place? I'm reasonably disciplined. I don't start three things and abandon all three by accident. The longer I sat with it, the less it looked like a failure of discipline and the more it looked like an instinct I hadn't listened to. Each of those methods had given me something I genuinely needed. None of them was built around the thing I was actually trying to organise, which was my life.
So I told Claude to put the borrowed plan down, and to reorganise the whole vault around the lifestack method instead. The eight domains. Vocation, Health, Relationships, Finances, Growth, Purpose, Recreation, Identity, with Identity at the root. The same eight we use on a person, and the same eight a business runs on at a larger scale.
The difference wasn't subtle. Opening the vault stopped feeling like a chore and started feeling like looking in a mirror. Notes that had floated homeless for months found a place in an afternoon. But the real change was in my head, not the software. I'd spent two years trying to make my thinking fit a shape designed for a generic user. The moment the shape matched my actual life, the whole thing got easier to think in.
Claire:
Here's why I wanted Steve to tell you that.
The mistake he nearly made wasn't really about notes. He was about to take a borrowed structure, one built to work for everyone, which means built for no one in particular, and force his own life into it. He caught it. Most people don't.
Because we do exactly this with far more than our filing. We feel scattered, so we reach for someone else's system. A productivity method, a morning routine, a framework lifted whole from a book. It half-works, because it was built for a generic person and you are not one. The parts that fit, fit. The parts that don't, you force or quietly drop. And when the whole thing drifts, you do the cruellest possible thing. You blame yourself for the drift, instead of the borrowed shape that never fit you to begin with.
I see this constantly in the owners we work with. They're not short on systems. They're running three half-adopted ones at once and feeling like a failure for it. The problem was never their discipline. It was that none of the structures was built around them.
The fix isn't a better borrowed system. It's organising around your own architecture. For a vault, that's the eight domains. For a whole business, or a whole life, it's the same eight at a larger scale, which is the thing we're building lifestack to do. You stop translating yourself into someone else's categories and start seeing your life in its own terms, which turns out to be the first thing you have to do before you can actually run it.
Take the prompt
Steve had Claude run this audit using a specific prompt, written to make the assistant stop and think before it touched anything, which is the whole point. We're giving it to you. Paste it at your own notes and it will run the same audit: tell you which borrowed methods you're half-running, where things have no home, and how to reorganise around your own structure instead.
You are going to help me reorganise my notes system so that it reflects my life, rather than a generic template. My notes are currently a partial, drifted blend of borrowed methods, and I do not want you to simply pick one and force everything into it.
First, audit. Do not change anything yet. Walk my folder structure and tell me, honestly: which organising methods are present (for example PARA, the Johnny.Decimal numbering system, Linking Your Thinking / Ideaverse), and how completely each is actually implemented; where those methods conflict or overlap, and where notes have no clear home; what the structure reveals about how I actually work, versus how the methods assume I should.
Then reframe, around a personal architecture. Do not consolidate onto a single borrowed method. Reorganise around eight life domains, treating me as a system with a structure rather than a to-do list: Vocation, Health, Relationships, Finances, Growth, Purpose, Recreation, Identity. Identity is the root: everything ultimately traces back to it.
Keep the useful scaffolding, anchored to the domains. A small set of numbered top-level zones for actionability: Inbox (capture), Projects (live work), Archive (dormant), Content (what I publish), Meta (the rules of the system). Add Builds if I write code. A Life Architecture zone holding the eight domains, numbered (for example 11 to 18) so the order never shuffles. Maps of Content that hang off the domains and ventures, so linking happens inside a structure that means something.
Add the connective tissue. Propose a short frontmatter schema for every note, with fields such as type, domain, entity (which venture it serves), used_by, and status. Keep a controlled tag vocabulary so the vault can be queried later.
Then plan, carefully. Produce a target structure and a file-by-file migration map before moving anything. Set up a safety net first (a git commit or a full backup), and check each phase before continuing. Organise around where my attention and energy actually go, not where I wish they went. Prove, then encode: do not automate or systematise anything until it has been done by hand enough to know it works.
Before you begin, ask me clarifying questions, one at a time, where they would meaningfully improve the result. Then propose the plan and wait for my approval before making changes.
We're releasing the other two pieces from this on our socials over the next week: the agent skill file, if you'd rather Claude did the heavy lifting, on LinkedIn, and a one-page field guide for setting up a vault this way over on Instagram. Follow along if you want them.
The mess was never really the problem. The borrowed shape was.
Build the one that fits.