Transcription
Most business owners are using multiple tools like Slack, email, calendar, task manager, maybe a project management tool. But the problem is none of the tools talk to each other. None of them actually know your business. But there's a system that changes that and almost nobody's building it. It's not a new app. It's not another AI chatbot. It's two tools, Claude Code and Obsidian connected in a way that turns your notes and your brain dumps and your ideas into an AI that knows your entire business. I built it. I call it my AI chief of staff. And every morning it briefs me on my whole business, my calendar, Slack, email, tasks, projects with just one command. So in this video, I'm going to show you why this system is so powerful, how it works, and how to build your own.
Now, real quick, if you're watching this and thinking, I just want to do more of the work that only I can do in my business, and have everything else handled by AI. Well, I built an app for that inside my AI Playbook membership community, and it's called your zone of genius app. In the app, you get a complete AI team that takes care of everything in your business that isn't in your zone of genius. It's completely customizable and personalized to you and your business. There's a free 7-day trial to the app and the community, which I'll link to in the description below.
All right, let's get into the AI system that most people aren't building. And this system has three layers to it. And the first layer is Obsidian. This is where all the knowledge lives. Obsidian is just an organizational tool based on markdown files. And you can have folders and files and so forth in Obsidian. Now, here's the thing about markdown and why it matters. Markdown files are essentially a universal file format that plays really well with AI. It's basically the language that AI reads the best. Not PDFs, not Google Docs, plain text markdown. So, Obsidian becomes essentially Claude's memory of your business.
Now, the second layer in this system is Claude skills, which are reusable instructions that you've written once that tell Claude how to do a specific task or job. And the skills are set up as slash commands. So, for example, when I type in forward slash today, Claude isn't just improvising. It's following a specific skill that that slash command triggers. The skill has the rules, the structure, what to pull from, what tools to use, what to write, etc. And this is important because instead of me reexplaining everything every time, the thinking pattern, and Claude knowing exactly what to do every time, it's already built in. And by the way, I have a whole video on Claude skills here in the channel, which I'll link to in the description below.
The third layer in this system is Claude Code which I run inside of VS Code. This is where the work actually happens. Claude Code can read, write, search every file in my Obsidian Vault. It can create new things in there. It connects to my Google calendar, my Slack, my email, and whatever other tool that I want it to connect to. Cloud code makes it super super easy. So, Obsidian is the knowledge. Skills are the thinking, the way you get something done the same way every single time. And cloud code is the execution. That's the system. And when these three layers are connected intentionally, you get something that no single tool gives you. An AI that is custom to how you work, your workflows, your specific business. It's a tool that knows your business, knows your context, your team, your goals, etc. And you can build this around almost any type of business that you have, coaching, agency, course creation, whatever.
Now, how much control you get from this system comes down to really two decisions. Now, the first decision you want to make is about knowledge. What Claude should know versus what Claude shouldn't touch. So, in my system, I have folders for tasks, projects, ideas, content, people I work with, and a quick capture inbox, for example. Claude reads and writes to all of those. But I also have daily notes, which you can see right here. And daily notes are my space. I don't let Claude touch my daily notes. That's where I'm brain dumping. These are my messy thoughts. These are screenshots I grab. But then I have daily plans. And the daily plan is something that Claude writes to. And this is where Claude takes all the things that are ongoing in my business, my calendar, my tasks, uh, Slack messages, what I have going on, and puts them into a structured daily plan page. And these two pages, the daily page and the daily plan page are linked together, which you can see right here. So, if I click on this, takes me over to my daily plan page for today. One is mine, the daily notes page, and the other one is Claude's, which is the daily plan page. And that distinction right there is something that's going to be really important for you. What Claude owns versus what stays yours. That's going to be a design decision for you.
Now, the second decision that you're going to want to make is about the thinking layer. What you create Claude skills for versus what you bring in at the moment. Again, Claude skills define how Claude approaches a task every single time without you having to reexplain everything each time. And as you can see here, right in my Obsidian, I have a whole list of these skills which we'll be using some in this video today.
Now, let me show you what I actually built here. So, what I did is I built a chief of staff system, and I want to walk you through what's actually inside it. I created a specific structure in Obsidian. Well, I actually had Claude Code do that. I created folders and files for tasks, projects, ideas, again, daily notes. Now, quick credit here, by the way. I saw how this guy Brad over at Brad AI and Automation YouTube channel, how he structured it. I looked at his approach, made it my own, and the simplicity of it really, really works. I'll link to his channel below in the description. I also set up what's called front matter at the top of files. So, for example, this is a task page here in Obsidian, and it's essentially like fields in notion. So, as you can see here, it's the has the type, the status, is it open, is it done, due date, tags, priority, created, recurring, etc. And this front matter is exactly what makes everything super easy to search both for me and for cloud code inside of Obsidian.
Now, I also create a dashboard here in Obsidian. So, this is my default page when I go into Obsidian. And this dashboard is showing me everything I've got going on in my business. So, it's pulling in from my calendar. So, it's pulling in what I have scheduled that day. It's pulling in from Slack. It's pulling in from my emails. It's reviewing what's in my day notes. It's creating a day page for me. It tells me what I have coming up this week. Also, it had gives me a list of everything that I have from a task perspective, what I have not assigned a due date to yet. And then this is where it's capturing my ideas. I'm not putting any of this in the dashboard itself. I this this is all brain dump. This is where cloud code is grabbing information from within my Obsidian that I have captured my brain dumps etc. and putting it all into one central dashboard so that it's super easy for me to uh keep track of. So that's the infrastructure. That's the folder structure, the front matter on the task pages and the project pages for example, and the dashboard.
Now, let me show you how I actually use this system day-to-day, like what my workflow is. And I'm going to walk you through three different scenarios. How I start my morning, how I handle the messy middle of the day where I'm just capturing notes and brain dumping things, and then how the whole thing compounds over time.
So the first scenario is the morning briefing. I open up Obsidian. The dashboard is going to load automatically because again, I've set it to my to be my default page. Then I open Cloud Code inside of VS Code, and I just type in forward/to today. So, here's what's happening. The today's skill that I've created pulls in from my calendar again, scans my Slack DMs and Slack channels, checks my email, finds tasks that are due within my Obsidian, and it's going to write a daily briefing for me. And then that briefing gets saved as my daily plan page. And here's an example of what the daily plan looks like. It tells me what the big items are today, what needs my attention. It also is creating that daily plan page in my plans which shows up right over here as a markdown file. And I can the beauty of VS Code is I can look at this right in VS Code or I can go right over into Obsidian however I want to do it. And here is that day plan page right here in Obsidian. This is my the whole day schedule and essentially what needs to get my attention. And then I just refresh the dashboard here in Obsidian. And now my calendar and my needs response section are populated with everything I need for that specific day. And as my morning one command here in cloud code, full picture of my business set right here in Obsidian.
So for the second scenario, it's kind of what I like to call the midday operation. So the morning one that we just talked about, kind of the clean version as I like to look at it. Now let me show you the messy version. What happens throughout the day? What I do is I brain dump into my daily note or my capture inbox. So this is an example of my daily note right here. And this is where I can put any random thoughts. So just for example, I had a thought for my newsletter. So I can just brain dump that part into my daily note here. Or I saw something that I liked in an email newsletter about creating engaging short form videos. So I grabbed it, copied it, put it right into my daily note here. I don't worry about formatting. I just get it out of my head, which for me personally is really, really important to do. And then what I do is I run one of my slash commands. Again, this is a skill that I've created called process inbox. So, I'm going to type that in. So, you can see what it's doing here. It says, "Let me scan the inbox sources. I already have the fresh Slack and email data from the today run." So, it's taking my brain dumps and the notes I've taken throughout the day and throughout the week, actually, and then sorting that into tasks, into ideas, into people, and assigning it to people. And so, as you can see here, it shows me what it found. It's found all these things here in that using that claude skill that process inbox. And then what it's going to do, it's going to ask me before anything that it doesn't quite know what to do with, it's going to ask me as you can see here. So it says, "What should I do with the AIP growth next steps?" I'm going to click on skip. And then it's going to continue to ask me these questions here about the things that it has surfaced. And then let's just say I have an idea that I have a new task that I want to assign to somebody on my team. What I can do here is use one of the other Claude skills that I've created for the chief of staff here and type in the slash command new. And then I can say forward/ new follow up with Kelly about community report or what have you. And so you can see here what it's going to do is I'll say it'll say I'll check if Kelly has an existing people file before creating anything. So the first things first it's going to check to make sure that Kelly quote unquote exists in my Obsidian here. Then it says when do you need to follow up with Kelly? I'm going to say uh let's just say Friday. Submit the answer. And just like that, it's created a task for me. You can see over here in the front matter. I'll look at it here in Obsidian and show you that in just a second. But it gives me the type, it's a task. Uh it says the status is open. Tells me when it's due, gives me the tag, the priority, when it was created, and then this is the actual uh task. Also, you'll notice it has double brackets around the the person. So, this will link back to the person Kelly in my people folder here in Obsidian. So, it's connecting everything together. And then you can see here over in Obsidian, this is what the page looks like in Obsidian. So, this is the task page, follow up with Kelly. Here's the the due date. Here's all the the properties. But again, I didn't create all any of these pages. Actually, Claude Code created it because I explained to it what it is that I wanted it to do. And when I do that, when I create a new task like that, I don't have to think about where it goes. Claude code is taking care of that because of the skills that I've created as part of this chief of staff system.
So, for example, if I look at this on my dashboard and I see that this is a Slack message from Ara on my team, I don't need to go to Slack to respond to her. I can send a Slack message to Ara from right within Cloud Code here. So I can just type in simply reply to R in Slack saying go ahead with the recent format and then it'll send the message directly. I don't have to leave cloud code here in order to send a Slack message. Another slash command I've created again another Cloud skill I've created as part of this chief of staff system is to use followup. So I can start typing in follow if I can type followup. And what this is doing is checking to see if anybody is waiting on me and also who I'm waiting on across Slack and email. So, as you can see here, it's it's searching across my Slack, also across the email, and it's going to give me a little report here saying, "Hey, waiting on Rick. Need a response. A R is waiting. There's other uh other people waiting or I'm waiting actually." And then Kelly on my team sent me a Slack DM. What I love about this is I'm not having to leave the workspace here in Cloud Code and it's reaching out to all the tools that I use in the business. Again, this these are only three right now. I'm going to be adding more to this, but it's bringing everything in. So I don't have to be in seven different tools going back and forth.
So the way I look at it, the morning briefing, if you will, is like the clean version. The midday is kind of the messy version. So it has the brain dump, you know, any kind of notes I capture during the day, any ideas.
So for the third scenario, this is sort of the end of the day recap, what I call the flywheel. So what I've created here is AI is going to search through all the things that we got done today and that I worked on and create a daily review for me all in one central place. So again, I created a claude skill for that and a slash command. So I can just type in daily review. And so what Claude is going to do, it's going to compare what I planned that morning compared to what I actually did. It's also going to update task statuses, if I got something done or not, or I'm working on it right now. So it's going to give me a picture of where things actually landed at the end of the day. So as you can see here, activity today, which makes sense. Uh it was little activity. There's actually a lot of activity today. I did a podcast recording. I was interviewed. There was something at my daughter's school. Then I did training at 3:00. Then it's saying, "Let me check if the sagi task got done and append the review." And so it's asking me if I actually did that. And then it's saying likely incomplete. So what I want to do here is I want to update it whether this is actually true or not. Did I did I reply to Sagi? I have not yet. Did I review the B-roll? Yes. Do I need to make some decisions about these sponsors? Yes. So then it's asking me what I want it to do. So, do I mark the does it mark that task carried forward or append the review? What's the status of it? And this is where the flywheel really kicks in because here's the thing. I take notes about a project, for example, and then the next time that Claude works on that project, it just reads those notes so it knows exactly where we are. And then tomorrow morning when I type in the slash command today again, Claude reads all of it all over. And the briefing will be better. The plan's going to be sharper because it continues to take all this information and just builds on each other. And the system just keeps getting smarter and smarter and smarter. And I'm not really training it anymore, per se. I'm just taking notes. I'm just doing my normal daily workflow, putting that notes and ideas and captures and tasks and projects, etc. into Obsidian and Claude Code is just doing the rest. The more I add to Obsidian, the smarter the overall chief of staff system is getting. It's just a flywheel, as I like to look at it.
Now, why do I like this approach better than anything else that I've seen or tried? Well, something like Notion AI, for example, as as good as it is, it's confined into the Notion ecosystem. With this system that I built here between Obsidian and Cloud Code, I'm not confined into that here. I can completely customize this to however I work. The system is mine. Yes, I'm using Obsidian, but those files are living on my computer. I'm not locked into one vendor or whatever. It allows me to go from using, you know, seven different tools down to just two. Obsidian and Claude Code. So that's the system and it's not complicated to build. The real work is using it consistently. I run my entire business now through Claude Code here in VS Code and Obsidian.
Now if you want the actual slash commands that we talked about here today, the folder structure, the dashboard setup, the skills files, everything I just showed you, I put it all inside the AI playbook community, I'll link to it. You can grab it, set it up, start running your own AI chief of staff. I'll link to it in the description below. As always, thanks so much for watching today's video. I'll see you in the next.