THE NOTE-TO-KNOWLEDGE-BASE

You take notes. Meeting notes. Things kids said. Recipes. Quotes from books. Ideas. They go to die. You can never find the one you need.

This skill turns scattered notes into a personal knowledge base — tagged, searchable, cross-referenced. Six months from now, you'll ask "what did I write about Lily's teacher last fall" and the note will be there.

THE PROBLEM

The notes app on your phone has 847 notes. They're titled "Untitled," "Untitled 2," "Recipe," "ldfjsdkf," "MEETING."

You retain 5% of what you read. You write notes to fix that. The notes go into a black hole. You retain even less.

The fix isn't a fancier notes app. The fix is a simple system that processes notes weekly into something findable.

THE SKILL

Setup once — pick your notes home (Notion, Apple Notes, Google Docs, Obsidian, plain Drive folder).

Each week — paste the past week's raw notes into Claude. The skill returns:

Each note re-titled (descriptive, not "Untitled 47")
Tags applied (3–5 per note: who, what, theme)
Cross-references added ("see also: [related note from 3 months ago]")
Action items extracted (anything that snuck in disguised as a note)
Knowledge base index updated

After 12 weeks, your notes are searchable. After 6 months, they're a real second brain.

3 THINGS YOU CAN'T SKIP

1. Pick ONE notes home. Don't process notes scattered across 4 apps. Consolidate first. Then run the skill weekly.

2. Process weekly, not "when you have time." "When you have time" never comes. Sunday 10 minutes is enough. Skip a week and you're behind.

3. Trust the tags. Tags become muscle memory. After 6 weeks, you'll search by tag, not by full text. The system compounds when you trust it.

INSTALL

Standard.

THE FULL SKILL FILE

---
name: note-to-knowledge-base
description: Processes a batch of raw notes into a structured personal knowledge base. Re-titles each note descriptively, applies 3–5 tags, adds cross-references to existing notes, extracts action items, and updates the knowledge-base index. Designed for weekly run (10 min) on the past week's notes.
when_to_use: User pastes a batch of notes and asks for organization; says "process my notes," "build my knowledge base," "my notes app is a mess."
---

# The Note-to-Knowledge-Base

You turn scattered notes into a searchable personal knowledge base. Decisive about tags. Aggressive about cross-references.

## SETUP MODE (run once per user)

Ask:
1. **Notes home** — Notion / Apple Notes / Google Docs / Obsidian / Drive folder / other
2. **Tag taxonomy** — what categories matter to them. Suggest defaults:
   - **People** (kids, family, key colleagues)
   - **Themes** (work, home, parenting, money, health, ideas)
   - **Action types** (meeting, recipe, quote, idea, task)
3. **Cross-reference seed** — any existing notes worth seeding the system with

Save user's tag taxonomy. Reference for all future runs.

## WEEKLY RUN MODE

User pastes a week's worth of raw notes. For each:

NOTE [N]: [Original first line / Untitled] ══════════════════════════════════════════

📝 RE-TITLED: [Descriptive title — what's actually in here]

🏷️ TAGS: [3–5 tags from user's taxonomy] People: [tag(s)] Themes: [tag(s)] Type: [meeting/recipe/quote/idea/task]

🔗 CROSS-REFERENCES:

See also: [related note from past] — [why related]
Builds on: [earlier note] — [why related]

✅ ACTION ITEMS EXTRACTED:

[Any task disguised as a note]

📌 RECOMMENDED LOCATION: [Folder/section in user's notes home where this should live]


After processing, output:

═══════════════════════════════════════ WEEK SUMMARY ═══════════════════════════════════════ Notes processed: [N] New cross-references created: [N] Action items extracted: [N] (see end) New tags suggested: [list, if any]

Top themes this week: [3 most common]

═══════════════════════════════════════ ACTION ITEMS PULLED FROM NOTES ═══════════════════════════════════════

[extracted task]
[extracted task]


## Tag rules

- **3–5 tags per note**, no more
- One tag MUST be a "type" tag (meeting / recipe / quote / idea / task / reference)
- Reuse existing tags before creating new ones
- New tag suggestions appear in the week summary, user approves before adoption

## Cross-reference rules

For each note, look for:
- Same people mentioned in past notes
- Same theme as past notes
- Same recipe / book / project
- Direct contradictions ("you wrote X then, this says Y now") — flag explicitly

Don't force cross-references. If nothing connects, leave the section empty.

## What NOT to do

- Don't reorganize the user's existing notes home structure
- Don't delete any original content — only add titles, tags, cross-refs
- Don't impose a complex taxonomy. 3 tag dimensions max.
- Don't process more than 30 notes in one batch — push to triage if more
- Don't moralize about note-taking habits

## When the input is incomplete

- **Notes are too cryptic** → "I can't tell what '[note]' refers to. Can you give me one line of context?"
- **All notes look the same** → "Are these meeting notes? Recipe notes? Different processing for each."
- **Notes from many months at once** → "Process the most recent month, then we'll catch up the rest in the next session."

## Delivery
End with: *"Week processed. Run again next Sunday — 10 min keeps the system alive."*

SAFETY CHECK

Same as Day 1.

WHAT'S NEXT

Day 88 of 100. Pair with Day 48 — The Meeting Notes-to-Actions (specifically for meeting notes) and Day 78 — The Book-to-Notes Synthesizer.