I posted about reducing my "task noise" and got questions about my stack / how I work. Here’s an explainer!

The stack

1. Claude desktop with cowork
2. Obsidian for local notes & memory
   1. my folder setup would make a productivity guru weep, but here’s the two things that matter:
      1. A transcripts folder with a nested “inbox” folder and then I have one folder per month for transcripts. “cleaned up” transcripts live in the month, and the “inbox” is to paste ugly transcripts or drop .vtt files.
      2. a daily notes folder w/a note per day
3. Google Drive w/ the desktop sync app for sharable docs

The Agents:

Daily: Morning setup (before I get to work every day)

Checks my calendar and builds that day's note in Obsidian — bullet journal format, agenda up top, any open to-dos pulled in below. By the time I sit down, the scaffolding is already there.

Daily: EOD Sweep at ~4pm

Runs through all my Slacks from the last 24 hours, checks email and calendar, and produces to-do list items formatted the way I want. It's been a real unlock — it makes me feel like I can be a little more chill about stuff happening in Slack throughout the day, because I know it's going to get caught.

The timing is intentional: late enough that most of the day has landed, early enough to actually act on it.

Hourly: Meeting notes processor

After I get off calls, I make a new .md file in the “inbox” folder and drop the transcript. It’s usually horribly formatted b/c I’m copying out of zoom notes. Every hour, the task checks that inbox, pulls any new transcripts, converts them into clean Markdown files, and drops them into an inbox folder inside Obsidian. Since Obsidian is just reading local Markdown files, they show up automatically.

The pattern

None of this required becoming more disciplined. It required noticing which recurring tasks I was the only thing standing between "it happens" and "it doesn't" — and stopping being that thing.

Task noise isn't the big complicated work. It's the small stuff that adds up: the check-in you're supposed to do, the update you keep meaning to post, the notes you meant to process before the next call. Offloading those isn't laziness. It's just not being the bottleneck for things that don't need you.