When I was a kid, I would assemble binders with information about topics I was interested in. My favorite one was about airplanes and their specifications. I find that collecting information helps me organize it mentally. I think in a visual-spatial way, so when I recall a fact, I can picture the page it's on in a particular book and quickly flip to it.
While writing more for Contraption over the past year, I craved a better way to organize my drafts and thoughts. I found my notes spread across Ghost, Apple Notes, and my to-do app. And, as I began using LLMs for editing, I found myself frequently copying and pasting text between windows. So, over the last month I built a new writing system. I moved my drafts to a folder on my computer called "Three-ring binder", and set up AI as a research and copyediting assistant within it.
The idea for this system started when I saw a coworker using Cursor to organize notes from sales conversations. Cursor is an AI text editor intended for writing code. But it turns out that, as long as you're working with text files in local folders, then AI works just as well on prose as on code. AI coding tools are adept at searching, editing, and maintaining local files - and that's exactly what I needed to help organize my writing. So, I moved all of my writing and notes to local Markdown text files in folders on my computer, and sync the folder to GitHub for backups and revision history. I decided to use Obsidian as the main text editor because it feels less like a coding tool. But, any text editor - including VS Code or iA Writer - would work just fine for this setup.
Once my writing lived in local text files, I could layer AI into my workflows. The simplest approach is to use something like Claude Code to work directly on the files. You can ask it to search your past writing, suggest edits following your style guide, or organize your notes. I went a step further and gave my OpenClaw assistant named Bell access to the files. I can text Bell throughout the day to edit my notes. I will send things like "Add 'hegemony' to my word list" or "Here is a quote I like from this book. Transcribe it and save it." Bell keeps things organized, such as ensuring that each word I find interesting also has an accompanying definition.
Having my writing in local files also solved a problem I had with search. I often want to reference my past posts or look up things I have written. I found it hard to access that information scattered across the web. So I scraped and synced my old posts from multiple websites into Obsidian, including details like their publication date and URL. Now I can ask Bell ambiguous questions like "What was that jazz album I listened to last year?" and get an answer.
I found local search so useful that I began storing posts from some bloggers I frequently read. Online writers tend to develop ideas over many disparate posts, so answering simple questions like "How does Cal Newport do quarterly planning?" turns out to be difficult. With their posts synced locally, I routinely use AI to search them.
Beyond drafts and archived posts, I keep evergreen documents in a dedicated folder. I have a lot of lists in here that I build on over time: a style guide ("never use the word 'very'"), words I like, project ideas, people I admire, branding inspiration, and more. I use this for organizing my thoughts, but also as a reference for AI.
My writing process now looks like this: I write drafts in Obsidian. When I want feedback, I ask Bell to email me a critique of the post. (I recommend asking AI to critique writing - it finds holes in logical arguments or sloppy parts needing revision.) After rewriting by hand a few times, I ask Bell for copy edits following my style guide. I review these carefully, rejecting some and accepting others. Then, after some final polishing, I copy and paste the finished post into Ghost to publish it.
Here I sit in Obsidian, writing this post. The last several Contraption posts were written here in my digital three-ring binder. Using just local text files in folders seems old-school, but turns out to be the most effective way to leverage AI technology. As a kid, the beauty of my three-ring binders was that I could get lost in them, connect ideas, and do thinking. I have found that same feeling again, this time with an AI assistant that can search everything I have ever written. Altogether, I'm finding that this setup promotes immersive flow by keeping my entire process in one place.
