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Your KB Structure
A knowledge base is only useful if you can find things in it. This page covers how your KB is organized, where different types of content go, and how the Work Board keeps your daily work visible.
The PARA Method
Your KB uses PARA — a system designed by Tiago Forte for organizing digital information. It has four buckets, and everything goes into one of them:
📁 Projects
Active work with a deadline
Migration to new platform, Q3 planning, hiring for Team X. Has a clear end point.
🔄 Areas
Ongoing responsibilities
Team management, stakeholder relationships, product quality. No end date — you maintain these.
📚 Resources
Reference material
Processes, templates, how-to guides, technical references. Useful across projects.
🗃️ Archive
Completed or inactive
Finished projects, old meeting notes, past decisions. Still searchable, out of the way.
The key principle: organize by actionability, not by topic. A document about "authentication" could be a Project (migrating auth systems), an Area (security oversight), or a Resource (auth setup guide). Where it goes depends on what you are doing with it right now.
Full Folder Map
Here is the complete structure of a personal knowledge base:
My_KB/
├── Work_Board.md # Daily kanban — what you're doing now
├── Backlog.md # Someday/maybe — ideas, future tasks
├── People/ # One file per person you work with
│ ├── George-Costanza.md
│ ├── Elaine-Benes.md
│ └── ...
├── Meetings/ # Processed meeting notes
│ ├── 2025-01-15_Platform-Sync.md
│ ├── 2025-01-16_1on1-George.md
│ └── ...
├── Decisions/ # Decision records with context
│ ├── DEC-001_Auth-Migration.md
│ └── ...
├── Projects/ # Active project folders
│ ├── Auth-Migration/
│ └── Q3-Planning/
├── Areas/ # Ongoing responsibility areas
│ ├── Team-Management/
│ └── Platform-Quality/
├── Resources/ # Reference material
│ ├── Onboarding-Checklist.md
│ └── Team-Processes.md
├── Archive/ # Completed/inactive items
├── Inbox/ # Unprocessed items to file later
└── Templates/ # Blank templates for new files
├── person-template.md
├── meeting-template.md
└── decision-template.md
├── Work_Board.md # Daily kanban — what you're doing now
├── Backlog.md # Someday/maybe — ideas, future tasks
├── People/ # One file per person you work with
│ ├── George-Costanza.md
│ ├── Elaine-Benes.md
│ └── ...
├── Meetings/ # Processed meeting notes
│ ├── 2025-01-15_Platform-Sync.md
│ ├── 2025-01-16_1on1-George.md
│ └── ...
├── Decisions/ # Decision records with context
│ ├── DEC-001_Auth-Migration.md
│ └── ...
├── Projects/ # Active project folders
│ ├── Auth-Migration/
│ └── Q3-Planning/
├── Areas/ # Ongoing responsibility areas
│ ├── Team-Management/
│ └── Platform-Quality/
├── Resources/ # Reference material
│ ├── Onboarding-Checklist.md
│ └── Team-Processes.md
├── Archive/ # Completed/inactive items
├── Inbox/ # Unprocessed items to file later
└── Templates/ # Blank templates for new files
├── person-template.md
├── meeting-template.md
└── decision-template.md
What Goes Where
People/ — One Markdown file per person you interact with regularly. Contains their role, team, what they care about, communication preferences, and positions they have expressed in meetings. Claude creates and updates these automatically when processing meetings.
Meetings/ — Structured meeting notes. Each file has frontmatter with date, attendees, and type. The body contains summary, discussion points, decisions, and action items. Created by the process-meeting skill.
Decisions/ — When a significant decision is made, it gets its own record: what was decided, who decided it, what alternatives were considered, and what the rationale was. These get linked from meeting notes and People profiles.
Projects/ — Each active project gets a subfolder. Inside you might have a project brief, status updates, related meeting notes, and decision records. When a project completes, the folder moves to Archive.
Areas/ — Your ongoing responsibilities that do not have an end date. "Team management" or "platform quality" are areas. They contain notes, processes, and accumulated knowledge about how you handle these responsibilities.
Resources/ — Reference material that is useful across multiple projects and areas. How-to guides, process documents, templates, external research.
Archive/ — Completed projects, old meeting notes you rarely reference, past decision records. Still fully searchable, just not cluttering your active folders.
Inbox/ — A landing zone for things you have not filed yet. Raw notes, screenshots, quick captures. Periodically review and move items to their proper location.
Templates/ — Blank templates that Claude uses when creating new files. You can customize these to match your preferred format.
The Work Board
Your Work Board is a Kanban-style view of what you are doing right now. It lives in a single file at the root of your KB.
DOING
Review Import-Export migration PR
Draft Q3 OKRs for Vandelay Industries
TODAY
Prep for 1:1 with George
Reply to design feedback
THIS WEEK
Write team retrospective
Schedule Q3 planning
WAITING
Newman's legal review on contract
Elaine's feedback on RFC
DONE
Submit expense report
Process Monday standup
The Two-File System
Your daily work management lives in just two files:
Work_Board.md — Your active board. What you are doing right now, what is planned for today, what is coming this week, what is blocked. You look at this every day. Claude updates it when processing meetings (new action items get added) and during start-day / end-day routines.
Backlog.md — Your someday/maybe list. Ideas, future projects, things you want to get to but not this week. During weekly reviews, you pull items from Backlog into the Work Board. Nothing gets lost — it just lives in the right place based on urgency.
Why two files instead of a tool?
- They are plain Markdown — Claude can read and write them
- They are in your KB — they show up in search and backlinks
- They are under your control — no SaaS dependency
- They are fast — open a file, scan it, done
Other Ways to Organize
PARA is a good default, but it is a choice, not a requirement. Some people prefer:
- Johnny Decimal — numbered categories (10-19 Finance, 20-29 Engineering)
- Zettelkasten — flat structure with heavy interlinking
- By date — chronological folders (2025/Q1/January/)
- By team — one folder per team you work with
The good news: it does not matter that much. Two things make any structure work:
Frontmatter — Every file has YAML metadata at the top (date, type, tags, related files). This makes files searchable regardless of which folder they live in.
Wiki-links — Files link to each other using
[[File Name]]syntax. A meeting note links to People profiles. A decision record links to the meeting where it was made. These links work no matter how you organize your folders.
As long as your files have frontmatter and links, Claude can find what it needs. The folder structure is for your convenience when browsing. The metadata is for Claude's convenience when searching. Both matter, but the metadata matters more.