Your Vault Has a Shape

Five folders and a note for today — the difference between a system you keep and a pile you abandon in a month.

Second in Start Here. The first post got the tools installed; this one gives the folder a shape.

An empty Obsidian vault is a folder on your computer. There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s nothing special about it either — it’s the Documents folder you’ve been ignoring for years, with a nicer app pointed at it.

Here’s how it goes wrong, and I’ve done this more times than I’d like to admit. You make a few notes. Then a few more. They pile up loose where you can’t find anything, so you add a folder called Work, then one called Ideas, then one called Misc, which is the graveyard. A month later you’re searching your email instead of your notes.

Evernote, Notion, Apple Notes. Each one started with enthusiasm and ended with a thousand unsorted notes I never opened again. Every notes system dies the same way: the pile gets more expensive to maintain than it is to use, and one Tuesday you stop opening the app.

So before any AI goes near it, the folder needs a shape. Not a clever one. Just enough to answer “where does this go?” without thinking.

Five folders

Make these inside your vault:

Your Vault/
├── Inbox/       <- Quick capture. Everything lands here first.
├── Projects/    <- Active work with an end state.
├── Areas/       <- Ongoing responsibilities, no end date.
├── Resources/   <- Reference material you want to keep.
├── Archive/     <- Finished or inactive.
└── Daily/       <- One note per day.

Inbox is the one that matters most, and it’s the one people leave out. When you don’t know where something goes, it goes in Inbox and you sort it later. Without it you spend thirty seconds deciding where a note belongs — which doesn’t sound like much until you notice it’s enough friction to stop you taking the note at all.

Projects end and move to Archive. Areas don’t end. Resources are things you’ll want to look up but aren’t acting on. Archive is where finished work goes to stop cluttering the live folders, without being deleted.

If that looks familiar, it’s a simplified PARA — Tiago Forte’s method. You don’t need the book; the folder names explain themselves. Mine diverged from it within a few weeks and yours will too, because the specific folders aren’t the point. The point is that there are folders. Structure is what makes things findable, and findable is what makes any of this worth maintaining.

A note for today

In Daily/, make a file named for today’s date: 2026-08-04.md.

Use YYYY-MM-DD and nothing else. It sorts chronologically for free, forever, with no effort — January always files before June. Any other format and you’ll be fixing it in a year.

Three sections inside, and no more:

# 2026-08-04

## What I'm working on
-

## Notes
-

## End of day
-

Mine has grown since — it now carries session logs, energy, and a “decisions made” section I didn’t know I needed until I kept forgetting why I’d chosen things. But it grew because I was using it. I’ve watched people design a seven-section daily template with mood tracking and gratitude prompts and abandon it inside a fortnight, because filling in the template became the work.

Obsidian will make today’s note for you. Turn on the Daily notes core plugin, then open Settings → Plugin options → Daily notes, where you’ll find New file location (point it at Daily), Date format (YYYY-MM-DD), and Template file location if you want the three sections filled in automatically.

Making it repeatable

The folders only work if the assistant files things the way you would. Which means telling it the rules once, in the CLAUDE.md file from the first post, rather than every session:

Filing rules:
- Anything I capture in passing goes in Inbox. Don't try to
  file it properly.
- A new project gets a folder in Projects, not a loose note.
- Daily notes live in Daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md. When I say "today",
  read today's note before answering.
- Finished projects move to Archive. Never delete them.
- If you can't tell where something belongs, put it in Inbox
  and tell me.

Five lines and your folders are now enforced by something other than your own discipline at 11pm. The last one is the important one: given a choice between guessing at a location and asking, you want it to ask — and it won’t unless you say so.

Next: that instruction file properly. What goes in it, how it grows, and the way mine quietly went wrong for two months without me noticing.

Five folders, one dated note, five lines of filing rules. That’s the whole shape.