I Used Obsidian and Claude to Finally Understand My ADHD (And a Lot More)

Hi, it's G.

What if there was a tool that could actually explain your ADHD to you? Not the clinical version. The real version. Why you keep failing at the same things. Why the plans never move forward. Why the excitement dies by Thursday. That's what I was trying to build when I stumbled into Obsidian.

That's the ADHD thing nobody really warns you about. Hindi lang siya yung "nawawala ang susi mo" or getting distracted mid-sentence. It's this fog you live in where you can't see your own patterns. You succeed at random things and fail at the things you actually care about, and you genuinely don't know why. Every week feels like starting from zero. (Relate?)

I had years of AI conversations sitting in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Hundreds of them. Late-night sessions, voice memo transcripts, half-finished ideas, things I was so excited about and then just... abandoned. Fears I kept circling back to without even realizing it.

What if the answer was already in there?

It started with a YouTube video. ICOR with Tom posted "Obsidian With Claude: The Setup I Said You Didn't Need." A few weeks earlier he made a video saying you don't actually need Obsidian for AI knowledge management. A plain folder of text files is enough, kasi Claude can work with that directly. Then his audience pushed back. So he made the follow-up anyway.

Yung framing niya ang nag-click sa akin: Obsidian is just a layer on top of files you already have. Not a ritual. Not a two-week migration project. Just a visual interface on a folder that lives on your own computer.

Quick explainer kung bago ka sa Obsidian:

It's a free notes app. Unlike Notion or Google Docs, your notes don't live in someone else's cloud. They're plain .md files on your machine, readable by any text editor, yours forever. Two things make it special. First: Graph View, which shows you how all your notes connect to each other visually, parang isang web ng ideas mo. Second: a community plugin called Terminal, which opens a command line right inside Obsidian.

And once you have a terminal inside Obsidian, Claude Code can read your entire vault.

Yun lang ang setup: install Obsidian, install the Terminal plugin, run Claude Code from that terminal. One file called CLAUDE.md tells Claude everything about your vault. No MCP servers, no complicated configuration. That's literally it.

Tom's video showed me the mechanics. Pero yung ginawa ko sa mechanics, iba na.

I downloaded my full chat histories from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Basta lahat, dinump ko sa isang folder inside Obsidian. Then I opened the terminal, fired up Claude Code, and said: basahin mo lahat to. What do you see? What do I keep coming back to? What do I keep abandoning? What does my ADHD actually look like in these conversations?

It took a while. Marami talagang i-process.

Pero yung lumabas sa kabilang dulo, hindi productivity system. It was a document about me.

Claude called it "Who I Am." It mapped my actual patterns, not the clinical definition of ADHD but what it looks like when I'm living it. The projects I start at 2am and ghost by Thursday. The ideas I'd described in five different conversations across two years without ever connecting them. The things I always say I'll do "once I have time" that I never actually do. The things I do without being asked, yung mga gagawin ko kahit walang magbabayad. Those ones.

Reading it felt strange, honestly. Parang may nagbabantay pala sa akin the whole time and I just never thought to ask what they noticed. (Hi, self.)

From that base document, Claude helped me build a few more files na naka-live na ngayon sa vault ko:

Brand Voice & Tone. How I actually write when I'm not overthinking it. Not a style guide I invented from scratch. A pattern Claude pulled from everything I've already written.

ADHD Patterns. My specific failure modes, documented and named. Para makilala ko sila earlier instead of realizing three weeks in na ginagawa ko na naman yung thing.

Gian Profile. A paste-ready summary of who I am that I can drop into any AI tool. No more explaining myself from scratch every single session. (Nakakapagod kasi. lol)

Ideas Bank. Turns out I had been describing the same app ideas across different conversations for over a year. Lahat nandoon na pala. I just never saw them together before.

Ito ang talagang nagbago.

Before, every time I opened Claude to write something, a blog post, a LinkedIn post, a message to a client, it didn't know me. I'd write in my voice, it would default to its voice, and I'd spend 20 minutes editing it back into something that actually sounded like me. Paulit-ulit. Every. Single. Session.

Now I have a source of truth. One folder in Obsidian. When I open Claude Code inside the vault, it reads those files first. It knows my voice. It knows my ADHD patterns. It knows what I actually care about versus what I just say I care about.

It's not writing for me. It's writing with me. Parang may writing partner ka na hindi mo kailangan i-brief ulit every single time. Na alam na niya kung sino ka.

Yun yung hindi ko inaasahan. I thought I was building a note-taking system. Pero nakapag-build pala ako ng something na nagpapalabas ng mas maganda sa utak ko, kasi ito na ang nagtatago ng mga bagay na lagi kong nalalimutan.

Favorite part ko pa rin yung graph view though. All those notes connected by threads. This idea linking to that project, this value showing up in three different places, this fear I mentioned in 2023 na nandoon pa rin in 2026.

Mine looks like a puffer fish. (lol)

Pero it also looks like a brain. My brain, rendered on screen for the first time.

Weird. Kind of beautiful. 10/10 uulitin ko.

This is Part 1. The self-knowledge layer. Understanding yourself well enough to actually build something useful on top of it.

Part 2 is what happens when you take that foundation and turn it into a content system. Multiple vaults. Slash commands for every platform. One blog post becoming fifteen pieces of content. Yun ang susunod.

Pero dito muna tayo. Before the system, kailangan mong kilalain ang sarili mo.

If you want to try this, I'm sharing the exact prompts I used to get Claude to analyze my chats, inside AI For Pinoys on Reddit and Skool. Halika na doon.

Baka mas kilala ka pa ni AI kaysa sa sarili mo. (Hindi fully joke yun. lol)

Till Part 2,

G