Obsidian + Claude: Build Your AI Chief of Staff's Atlas Folder in 7 Min

Full video transcript

In this video, I’m going to show you a quick start guide to using Claude with Obsidian. Before you get started with Obsidian, there’s a few things that you should know. You can think of it as a smart folder system with superpowers. What we see on the right hand side is the neural network Obsidian mapped to my AI chief of staff’s brain. I have a folder setup, which I call my Atlas folder. As Bruce Fleck, one of our longtime community members, put it, it’s really just a viewer to a big file structure. All your folders and subfolders it can see. You can view anything from it. There’s a lot more power, but just to get started, look at it as a big file system. It makes it easy to view things and search for things.

People are using Obsidian with Claude. I’m using it for the knowledge base for my AI chief of staff. It’s Claude’s memory. So whenever I boot up Claude Co-work or Claude Code, it opens a vault, reads my files, and knows my business context, my partners, my priorities, and my history without it, everything starts from zero. But that’s often what can happen if you’re reprompting chats because you don’t have a centralized knowledge base that Claude is always pulling from and keeping up to date. You can browse your vault in Obsidian’s interface and Claude can read the exact same files. So you can use this as your memory, and it’s free. There are optional sync services just to get started.

You’re going to go to obsidian.md in your browser, download it, and then go through the installation process. And now step two, creating your vault. So when you set up Obsidian, it’s not going to look like this. This is what mine looks like after our last few months as I’ve migrated my use, connecting it with Claude Co-work. When you get started, a folder just says Obsidian, create new vault, open a folder as a vault, or open a vault from Obsidian Sync. So if you’re just getting started, you’re going to create a vault. When Obsidian asks to create a new vault or open a folder vault, if you’re starting to create one, you can create a folder, create the location of that folder on your machine. So you can name it something as simple as whatever your AI chief of staff assistant name is, or you can just call it my Atlas folder. You can browse the folder, and if you don’t have a folder with that name under it, you would simply go and create, open it, and now you see that location. This vault is now synced with that specific folder. But what we see here is an empty vault because we haven’t filled it with anything. And that is where it comes down to setting up our folder.

There’s a number of ways that you can set this up. This is one starting point that you could structure your folders like: just having different folders that would fit underneath that file system as subfolders. So your index, user, feedback, business model, partnerships, projects, content, operations, things pending, references, archive, templates, and daily notes. You would simply create these folders by right-clicking and selecting to create a new folder. And you can get started with adding new folders. And just like that, inside of your Obsidian vault, I just opened up my Finder. You can see that the Atlas folder I set up has that index folder synced with it. So it’s happening in real time. It’s automatically syncing and using these files that are on your local machine. That’s where things are getting updated.

The great news is once you’re connecting Claude with Obsidian, you can have it actually help you build out these folders and work with the files on your computer to update and actually set this folder structure up. You can do it as simple as quite literally feeding it this document, which is going to be available as a free resource inside of Gen AI University community on School. So you can access this and use it as a quick start guide to get you set up. And that’s how you create the folders.

Now the next step is creating your first file. So I’ve already set up a file here. I can set it up in the index folder. You’re inside your Atlas folder on your computer. You can set up a different folder, a different memory folder inside of here. I’m going to call this one memory. And you can see that in real time it updated the memory folder on my Obsidian’s screen. We’re not going to go through setting up each one of these folders here, but the key is as you’re setting up and you’re filling out some of the initial folders that your Claude Co-work is going to be looking into, it needs to know where information is being stored and organizing. And again, it can help you with doing that too. So once you set up your first files, you’re going to want to connect your Claude Co-work to get everything synced up, rocking, and rolling.

Now the step is opening up your Claude Co-work on Claude desktop. If you don’t have Claude desktop, you just go to claude.ai, download, get Claude on your desktop. You do need a Pro subscription to be able to utilize Co-work. So what you’re going to want to do is first point it to the folder that we’ve made, because what this is doing is giving Claude Co-work a window to peer into and see all the files. If your assistant was showing up every day to work and read a certain file, guidelines and employee handbook, everything that you have going on in your business, that is what this folder is going to contain. So I have a number of different folders here. I’m going to select choose a different folder and select the folder that I’ve been setting up with my new Obsidian vault folder. So I’m going to select my Atlas folder. I typically always allow it to modify the files in these folders because it’s going to be taking actions on my behalf. And I selected that folder, and I’m telling it right now. So now that I’ve given it access to this folder, it is going through searching the folder and telling me that it can see the index welcome MD and stuff that we’ve initially started. It hasn’t been set up right now.

So the next thing that you can do, if you download this quick start guide inside of the computer, is a fast track to getting you started. Upload the getting started document and say something along the lines of, I want you to help me build out my file infrastructure and architecture following the guidelines in this document. Now it’s read the standard operating procedure and it’s asking me a question before I build. This is a demo template we’re going to be building out for this video. So I say build it, Claude Co-work go to work, and actually help me with structuring my files and my architecture on my local computer. That, as we’re building this out, is also going to be building it out and displayed inside of our Obsidian. So just so you can see how Claude is operating in real time, you should be able to see my Atlas folder that I’ve set up for this demonstration, my Obsidian account, as it’s building out these folders. It’s setting up the infrastructure for me.

I now have a full set of folders that I can use as a filing system. Thinking of my AI staff also as a librarian that needs to understand how these files are going to get added into what folders, keeping track of things. That’s all part of its memory: the feedback, the business model. This is everything that you would want any human assistant to know about you and your business. Think of your AI staff’s Atlas folder as that forever brain that they’ll be able to always come in, open up desktop, show up for work, read these files, understand the most latest context around your business, and help support you as a thinking partner to take some of the weight off of your shoulders and carry that for you so that you can show up and lead where it matters most.

The next steps from here is building out your vaults and using Claude inside of your Obsidian to build out your file structure and architecture, remembering that this is something you can take and transfer to any machine. You can use Obsidian Sync to sync it across different devices. You can also visualize that information here in your own Obsidian graph as you build yours out. This will continue to grow and you continue to see how the different projects and aspects of your business and life all interconnect to give you a true thinking partner that can grow with you.

Subscribe and share this video and join at Gen AI University on School to get access to this getting started template. I’ll see you on the next video.