Work Vault — User Guide

What is this?

This is a structured personal thinking layer for your daily work — built on Obsidian and designed to work with an AI agent.

It is not a second brain for everything in your life. It is not a company wiki. It is a fast-capture system for your working day: meetings, decisions, action items, ideas, and knowledge fragments — all linked, tagged, and searchable.

The core idea is simple:

Capture fast. Process later. Link everything.

You dump raw notes into a daily file throughout the day without worrying about structure or formatting. An AI agent then processes those notes — routing them to the right folders, adding wikilinks and tags, generating diagrams, and extracting todos — while you move on with your day.

---

Philosophy

1. One daily note per day. Everything goes in inbox/YYYY-MM-DD.md. Don't overthink where things belong while you're capturing — the agent handles routing.

2. The inbox is a temporary surface. Notes in inbox/ are unprocessed raw material. Nothing should live there permanently. After processing, notes are archived to inbox/processed/YYYY-MM/.

3. Todos are first-class citizens. Every action item lives in todos/topic-name.md. When you finish a topic, the file moves to todos/done/ — never deleted. You can always look back.

4. Link everything. Every reference to a person, project, or note should be a [[wikilink]]. This is what makes the vault a connected graph rather than a flat pile of files.

5. Tags have a registry. All valid tags live in tags.md. The agent will never invent new tags — it adds them to the registry first, then applies them. This keeps the tag space clean.

---

Getting Started

Step 1: Install Obsidian

Download and install Obsidian. It's free.

Step 2: Open this vault

In Obsidian, choose Open folder as vault and select the Work Vault Template folder. Obsidian will recognize the .obsidian/ config and restore all settings.

The Daily Notes core plugin is pre-enabled and pre-configured to create a new note in inbox/ using templates/daily.md each time you open Obsidian. You can verify or adjust this under Settings → Daily notes.

Step 3: Rename the vault (optional)

You can rename the folder to anything you like — e.g. My Work Vault. Obsidian uses the folder name as the vault name.

Step 4: Connect an AI agent

The vault's .instructions.md is the system prompt for your AI agent — it defines all the processing rules. Point your AI coding assistant to this vault folder and it will pick up the instructions automatically.

The prompts/ folder contains named prompts (process-inbox, prettify-links) you can invoke directly from your agent.

Recommended: Add this vault folder to the same VS Code workspace as your work repositories. This lets the agent cross-reference your personal notes with project code and documentation — enriching both in the same context window.

Step 5: Configure Project Awareness (optional but recommended)

If you work on a software project with its own documentation, fill in the Project Awareness section in .instructions.md:

• Point it to your project's docs folder
• Create knowledge/project-docs-index.md with a topic → file map
• The agent will then consult those docs before writing architecture or technical notes

---

Daily Workflow

Morning

Obsidian automatically creates a new daily note at inbox/YYYY-MM-DD.md using templates/daily.md.

Throughout the day

Open the daily note and dump all relevant information:

• Meeting notes under ## Meetings
• Action items under ## Todos
• Things you learned under ## Knowledge
• Project updates under ## Projects
• Half-formed ideas under ## Ideas
• Anything else under ## Random — the agent will classify it

You can write raw text, bullet points, paste URLs, leave things unformatted. The agent will structure it all.

You can also give the agent direct instructions using an agent callout anywhere in the note:

> [!agent] Create a mermaid sequence diagram showing the auth flow I described above

End of day (or whenever)

Run the process-inbox prompt:

/process-inbox

The agent will:

1. Run vault housekeeping (move stray files to the right folders)
2. Scan todos for completed items
3. Extract each section of the daily note into properly formatted files
4. Apply wikilinks, tags, callouts, and diagrams
5. Archive the daily note to inbox/processed/YYYY-MM/

---

Folder Reference

Folder	Purpose	What NOT to put here
inbox/	Daily capture notes	Permanent notes — process and move them
meetings/	Meeting notes by YYYY-MM/	Action items (go in todos/)
meetings/recurring/	One file per recurring meeting series	One-off meetings (go in meetings/YYYY-MM/)
todos/	One file per active topic	Completed todos (move to todos/done/)
todos/done/	Archive of completed todo files	Active tasks
ideas/	Raw thoughts and concepts	Polished notes (move to knowledge/)
knowledge/	Reference material, how-tos, concepts	Project-specific content (goes in projects/)
people/	One note per person	Team or org-level notes
projects/	Project status, architecture thoughts	General knowledge (goes in knowledge/)
assets/	Images and attachments	Notes
templates/	Note templates	Personal notes

---

Tags

All tags are defined in tags.md at the vault root. This is the single source of truth — the agent will never invent tags.

How to add a tag:

1. Open tags.md
2. Add a row to the appropriate table with the tag name and a "Use When" description
3. The agent picks it up automatically on the next processing run

Tag conventions:

• Always lowercase, kebab-case: #data-product, #api-standards
• Nested for hierarchy: #project/my-app, #priority/high, #status/active
• No # prefix in frontmatter YAML — only in inline body text

---

Recurring Meetings

Register your recurring meetings in meetings/recurring-meetings.md. This table tells the agent how to handle meeting notes from your daily dumps:

• Matching: the agent fuzzy-matches meeting titles against the Meeting Name and Aliases columns
• Appending: if a match is found, the agent appends to the existing file under a ## YYYY-MM-DD header — building a running history
• New meetings: if no match is found, the agent creates a standalone note in meetings/YYYY-MM/

To register a new recurring meeting:

1. Add a row to the table in meetings/recurring-meetings.md
2. The agent will create and manage the file automatically going forward

---

Todos

Each todo file covers one topic — e.g. todos/onboarding.md, todos/api-migration.md.

• New tasks for a topic get appended to the existing file
• When ALL tasks in a file are checked ([x]), the agent automatically sets status: done and moves the file to todos/done/
• todos/done/ is excluded from the graph view but kept forever for reference

Manual completion: say "I finished X" or "mark X as done" and the agent will handle the move.

---

Customizing for Your Context

Add your projects

1. Create a subfolder under projects/ for each project: projects/my-app/
2. Add project tags to tags.md: project/my-app
3. Update the snippet template in templates/snippets/snippet-project.md

Add your recurring meetings

Edit meetings/recurring-meetings.md and add rows for your real recurring meetings.

Connect to project docs

Fill in the Project Awareness section of .instructions.md with your repo's docs path and a topic→file map.

Extend the tag registry

Open tags.md and add topic tags that match your domain. The more precise your tags, the better the agent's routing and filtering.

---

Tips

• Write in the daily note first, always. Don't create files manually — let the agent do it. This keeps naming and frontmatter consistent.
• Use [[wikilinks]] even for things that don't exist yet. Obsidian shows them as unresolved — which is a useful map of gaps in your knowledge.
• The ## Random section is your friend. If you're not sure where something goes, put it in Random. The agent will classify it.
• Agent callouts are powerful. > [!agent] Do X inside any section of the daily note is a direct command to the agent — use it to trigger diagrams, summaries, or any custom action.
• Weekly cleanup (optional). Ask your agent to "do a weekly cleanup" to catch orphan notes, near-duplicates, and stale todos.