In this post I’m sharing my new approach to note-taking and task tracking, which has worked well so far.
You can easily customize this approach to fit your workflow and tools.
Anthropic released Cowork a few days ago.
I tried it for a few minutes and it was unusable for me.
It crashed several times and felt overall sluggish.
What I liked was the idea of the productivity plugin that you can integrate with Cowork.
I set up my own version of it that is agent agnostic and can be easily customized.
The core idea is a two-tier memory system that consists of working memory and deep memory.
The working memory lives in the AGENTS.md file and is updated by the agent while working.
It keeps track of the most active context.
The deep memory contains all your notes and lives in the /memory folder.
How you structure this folder is up to you, but here is a good starting point:
memory/: Long-term knowledge baseglossary.md: Complete decoder ring (acronyms, terms, nicknames, codenames)notes/{YYYY-MM}.md: Journal-like entries (YYYY-MM.md format)people/{name}.md: Keep track of people you interact withprojects/{name}.md: Project detailscontext/company.md: Teams, tools, processes
In addition, I use a TASKS.md to keep track of my tasks.
It’s a single file with sections.
You can easily modify the structure of this file or customize it into subfolders.
What makes this system so powerful is the integration of skills and third-party tools.
Need a calendar integration? No problem, just use the skill.
Want to keep track of your Jira or Linear tasks? No problem, just integrate their MCP.
It’s limitless.
I usually open two terminal tabs inside the project.
One with neovim and the other with opencode.
For simple notes or tasks I just directly modify the files.
For everything else I use opencode.
For rendering the markdown nicely I added an astro project and linked the files into it.
It’s just a bit nicer, in case I need to share some notes or need to focus on reading.
I currently use this system to keep track of everything.
Projects I’m working on, people I interact with and ideas that I want to follow up on.
It’s very useful to ask for weekly/monthly summaries, refine ideas or just ask about a project you need to follow up on.
I’ve only been using it for a couple of days now, so I’m sure the way I use it will evolve.
As I mentioned at the beginning, this is heavily inspired by Claude’s Cowork and the ideas presented are not new.
You can probably achieve something much more powerful with OpenClaw or some other note-taking tool, but I like the simplicity of this approach and want to stay in control for now.
Here is a template that you can fork and use to get started.