Mouth Machine Markdown

Before any AI, before any voice magic, you need somewhere for information to land. Everything else in this method just brings information in and structures it, and for that to be findable, organised, and usable, the container has to exist first.

I use Obsidian: folders and plain markdown files, nothing more. It's light, and it's cheap for an AI to read and edit. Compare that to something like Notion, which isn't plain text: an AI has to write code to rebuild each page, because the pages themselves are more complex. Obsidian just works, folders and text.

My system is a bastardised version of PARA, the classic four-folder method:

You don't create folders by hand. You talk to the machine.

Claude connects to Obsidian directly. It's just markdown folders, so there's nothing to configure. The setup move is simple: tell Claude who you are and what your life looks like, then work with it to build a system that actually fits, and stays parseable. "I have three projects at work, I want meeting notes split per project so I can find them," and it organises the folders.

The important caveat: keep it manually parseable. Don't let Claude run loose creating folders forever; that mistake gets made once, and once is enough. Parse it yourself every so often, because out and about, there's no direct line from your phone into Obsidian. The day you need to find something by hand, the system has to make sense to your brain, not just to an AI.

Templates are what make it parseable, and what keep Claude consistent. Every daily log follows the same shape: what's happening today, the day's structure, a morning/afternoon/evening log. Same shape every time means it's trivial to scan. The templates weren't built by hand either. They were built by asking Claude. Four of them do most of the work: a daily log, a meeting note, a client hub (status, recent meetings, recent shoots, open tasks, standing context), and a shoot report.

Folders plus templates: that's the skeleton.

Your mouth is faster than your fingers.

For a long time, typing at Claude was the whole workflow: "did this today, here's the transcript, log it on the template." That works. But talking is so much better.

Wispr Flow is the tool of choice here, though it doesn't have to be Wispr, or even Claude. It does want to be Obsidian; that's the best foundation this whole method has found. A few reasons Wispr specifically earns its place:

Why not just talk to Claude directly? Two reasons, both personal preference. One, Wispr's dictation is simply better for this, and it learns continuously, correcting once and remembering. Two, it's built for being on the go. Claude on a phone can't reach Obsidian; Wispr is the capture tool. The real use case: finishing a shoot, getting in the car, and word-vomiting while it's fresh, in and out times, what got shot, the small details that would otherwise be forgotten. Then home, the transcript into Claude: "make the shoot log, the meeting log, the daily log," done.

New, and worth flagging: Claude now integrates directly with Wispr Flow. No copy-paste. "Fetch my Wispr notes about project X and structure them into a folder and an ideas doc." It just goes.

The real payoff of the stack is that because the folders and templates already support it, Claude learns the patterns. There's no need to ask for a shoot log anymore, just "today is Wednesday, just came out of a shoot, here's what happened," and it already knows which client, which folder, which template applies. Talk. It files.

It's only as complex as it needs to be. This version is complex on purpose, built around tracking a lot of clients and people at once. A simpler version can be four folders and "hey, make a note of this."

Here's why it matters. A client got fired last month, the kind of person who makes you feel like you're losing your mind: a task gets done, and a week later it's "you never did that, when did you do that, that's late," the goalposts quietly moving each time.

Normally that means scrambling: digging through email, hunting for meeting transcripts, scrolling a WhatsApp thread, mid-argument, in a way that makes you look unsure of yourself.

Instead, mid-conversation with him, Claude got asked to check Obsidian: were these decisions made, was this asked for, were the tasks done, and when? Under a minute later, the answer was there: the meeting where it was decided, and confirmation he'd never actually asked for what he was now claiming.

That made it possible to say, calm and firm: this was the decision, on this date. Check the transcripts if you'd like. There's no record of what's being described; if there's one on the other end, show it. A memory fight turned into a fact conversation. No need to trust memory, or scramble. The receipts were already there.