---
title: The Vault: Atlas, Calendar, Efforts
description: The folder structure that acts as the assistant's long-term memory — evergreen knowledge, time-indexed records, and active work, each in its own place, all git-tracked and portable.
track: core
url: https://www.chiefofstaff.io/guides/the-vault
published: 2026-09-01
author: chiefofstaff.io editorial system
outcome: scaffold a vault with one hub note per area of your life, one note per recurring person, a decision log, an inbox, and a routines folder — and know where every new fact belongs without asking.
prerequisites: what-a-chief-of-staff-system-is
source: chiefofstaff.io
---

# The Vault: Atlas, Calendar, Efforts

The folder structure that acts as the assistant's long-term memory — evergreen knowledge, time-indexed records, and active work, each in its own place, all git-tracked and portable.

## Why Files

The vault is a plain folder of Markdown files. It is the assistant's entire long-term memory, and it is deliberately boring: readable by any editor, browsable in Obsidian, versioned by git, portable to any machine. No databases, no vendor memory features, no state stored anywhere else.

Two non-negotiable properties drove the choice:

- **Portability.** Vendor memory features tie the assistant's brain to one product and often one machine. A folder outlives all of that. Switch models in three years and the new one reads the same files.
- **Auditability.** Every change to the assistant's beliefs is a git commit you can read, diff, and revert. When it is wrong, you can see exactly when it became wrong, and why.

## Three Questions, Three Folders

The structure is called ACE, and it maps to the three questions an operator asks: *what do I know*, *what happened*, and *what am I pushing*. Readers of Nick Milo's LYT framework will recognise the shape.

![Three folders: Atlas holds evergreen knowledge (ventures, people, decisions, team charters); Calendar holds time-indexed records (daily notes, meetings, brief archive); Efforts holds active work (inbox, routines, feedback, reports).](/img/diagrams/ace-vault.svg)

### Atlas — What Is True

Everything that stays true over time.

- **One hub note per venture.** Every company, side project, investment, or life area gets `Atlas/ventures/<slug>/VENTURE.md` — and *family*, *health*, *home*, and *money* are ventures with equal standing. There is deliberately no central portfolio blob. Cross-venture synthesis happens by reading several files at brief time, which keeps context from bleeding between unrelated areas.
- **People are one note each**, at `Atlas/people/<Name>.md`. A person who appears in two ventures is still one note, referenced by wiki-link from both. The backlinks panel becomes a free CRM.
- **Projects are one note each**, under the venture they belong to, with frontmatter for status and outcome so they are queryable across the portfolio. A venture with more than about seven active projects cannot be reviewed weekly; excess moves to `someday.md`.
- **Hierarchy lives in frontmatter, not folders.** Ventures stay one folder deep; a `parent:` field expresses ownership trees. Re-parenting is a one-line edit, not a file move — and status (active, dormant, archived) is a frontmatter field too, never a folder name, because folders are permanent homes and status changes.
- **Decisions, identity, anti-patterns, team charters** all live here too: `decisions.md`, `about-me.md`, `anti-patterns.md`, `team/<slug>.md`.
- **Optionally, `resources/`** inside a venture, for long-lived source artifacts that are neither projects nor decisions: a manifesto, an externally prepared methodology, a reference framework the venture operates against.

### Calendar — What Happened

Daily notes (which double as the assistant's curation log), meeting notes, and an archive of every brief ever delivered. Nothing here is ever rewritten; history stays history.

### Efforts — What Is Moving

An `inbox/` where every raw capture lands before triage; the routine definitions for the daily and weekly briefs; the cadence file; the feedback log; and a `reports/` folder where deliverables land.

## The Tree

```text
vault/                          <- a git repo, and an Obsidian vault
├── CLAUDE.md                   <- the constitution
├── HOME.md                     <- dashboard note for the human
│
├── Atlas/                      <- evergreen knowledge
│   ├── about-me.md             <- role, voice, escalation triggers
│   ├── decisions.md            <- the decision log
│   ├── anti-patterns.md        <- known failure modes
│   ├── ventures/
│   │   ├── INDEX.md
│   │   ├── _template/          <- copy when adding a venture
│   │   ├── _archive/           <- retired ventures
│   │   └── <slug>/
│   │       ├── VENTURE.md      <- the hub note
│   │       ├── decisions.md    <- venture-local tactical calls
│   │       ├── someday.md
│   │       ├── projects/<project>.md
│   │       └── resources/      <- optional durable artifacts
│   ├── people/<Name>.md        <- one note per person
│   └── team/<slug>.md          <- one charter per sub-agent
│
├── Calendar/                   <- time-indexed
│   ├── daily/<YYYY-MM-DD>.md   <- daily note + curation log
│   ├── meetings/
│   └── briefs/archive/
│
├── Efforts/                    <- active work
│   ├── inbox/                  <- raw captures land here
│   ├── routines/               <- daily-brief.md, weekly-review.md
│   ├── cadence.md              <- the ritual schedule
│   ├── feedback.md             <- corrections, read every session
│   └── reports/                <- deliverables
│
├── delivery/                   <- channel config (no secrets)
├── .claude/agents + commands   <- runtime for sub-agents and slash commands
└── .beads/                     <- the task graph (JSONL, git-tracked)
```

## Editing Judgment

The assistant has full edit authority inside the vault, so the constitution gives it heuristics rather than gates:

- **Additive over rewrites.** Append a dated note rather than rewording an existing paragraph.
- **Never paraphrase the human's voice.** Decision reasoning and identity statements keep their original wording.
- **No cosmetic edits.** Every edit must reflect a fact change.
- **When unsure whether an edit adds value, skip it and surface it in the brief.** Letting the human decide is cheap; a wrong edit costs trust.
- **Structural changes get a decision record first.** Creating or archiving a venture, renaming a slug, changing a tool default — the record is written before the action.

## Provenance, Everywhere

When a fact traces back to a capture, the assistant leaves an HTML comment beside it: `<!-- src: inbox/2026-04-26-voice-3.md -->`. Invisible in rendered Obsidian, durable in plain text. Six months later, "why do we believe this?" has an answer — and when the belief turns out to be wrong, so does "where did the wrong belief come from?"

## The Two Places State Must Never Go

- **Not in the daily note as a capture surface.** The daily note is for structured reflection (top three, decisions made, curation log). Captures go to `Efforts/inbox/`. A daily note used as the only inbox is 1,000 lines of unprocessed bullets by month three.
- **Not in the model's memory features, and not in the constitution.** Both drift; neither is portable; neither is diffable.

## See it

The [demo vault](/demo/vault/home) has the vault this site describes, as one fictional founder's assistant actually built it. It is fictional, and it was built by Claude Code sessions running [the bootstrap prompt](/start#prompt) — not written by hand.