I stopped waiting for “one more weekend” to clean my notes

For years I told myself I would clean up my notes "one weekend." That weekend never came. I have a decent amount of notes, and almost none of them had frontmatter, tags, or a real place to live. I have folders for tech, work, personal stuff, and a few other things, but most of the time I just drop a note wherever the idea shows up.

Then one day the obvious thought showed up: Claude has scheduled tasks now, so why am I still waiting for the weekend?

So I asked Claude to organize the notes for me. It didn't just say yes. It asked for a plan first. It counted the files, looked at what was mixed in with what, and pointed out the obvious messes: loose notes, loose images, some stubs I clearly didn't want to delete, and a bunch of notes without tags or dates.

🧹 What got cleaned

The plan was simple. Group the loose notes. Move the loose images. Archive the stubs. Add frontmatter. And do it as a dry-run before anything touched the vault. That last part is what made me comfortable to keep going.

What I hadn't expected was that it was careful with things I didn't want to risk. It didn't delete anything. It archived stubs. It preserved frontmatter that was already there. It only added tags and a created date where they were missing. That's a nice distinction, because a cleanup script that rewrites everything is the kind of tool I would have to think twice about.

Once I approved it, it moved through the work. And then, since I didn't want to keep doing this every week, I asked Claude to schedule it. Now it runs as a recurring Sunday task and does the same pattern again: archive stray stubs, consolidate images, route loose notes, and tag anything that still lacks frontmatter.

🔁 If you want the same setup

Here are the two prompts I use to recreate the pattern. Use them as starting points, then replace the folder names and timing with whatever fits your vault.

For the first pass, ask for a dry run:

Scan my notes folder, but don’t change anything yet. Show me a plan to handle loose files, loose images, and empty or stub notes. Propose where each item should go, use an archive folder instead of deleting anything, and suggest missing frontmatter/tags. Ask for my approval before making changes.

For the recurring version, describe the schedule and the same guardrails:

Create a weekly scheduled task for Sunday at 9:00 AM. It should archive empty or stub notes, move loose images to my images folder, route loose top-level notes into the right folders, and add only missing tags and frontmatter. It should not delete anything or overwrite existing tags. Before acting on anything unclear, it should ask me first. At the end, send a short report of what moved, what was tagged, and what was skipped.

🌱 What I got back

That changed the deal with myself. I was always lazy about this cleanup, and honestly, I probably always will be. But now "I'll clean this up later" means a recurring agent-run routine, not a vague weekend that never arrives.

I don't think this is some magical solution. It's the kind of boring, repeatable work that benefits from being delegated instead of moralized. The important part isn't that Claude did the cleanup. It's that I get clean notes and peace of mind without turning it into another discipline project.

Now the system does a little of that for me. And I like that a lot better than trying to remember the exact folder I meant to use.