A personal operating system template
Here is the whole structure, in plain folders and files you can create in an afternoon. It is deliberately smaller than most templates you will find, for a reason that becomes obvious about six weeks in.
The structure
hub/
projects/
<project-name>/
index.md the one true file: status, decisions, open questions, next action
sources/ the raw material, dated
people/
<person-name>.md history, what you owe them, what they owe you
decisions/
<date>-<topic>.md what was chosen and why
reference/
reading/ what you read and wanted to keep
records/ derived views, never hand-edited
routines/
weekly-review.md the routines, described once, invoked by name
daily-brief.md
That is the entire thing. Four top-level ideas plus the routines that run over them. If your reaction is that it is too simple to hold a life, that reaction is the one this template is built to resist.
What goes in each file
| File | Holds | Never holds |
|---|---|---|
| project/index.md | Current status, open questions, the decision log, the next action, links to its own sources | Raw material. That goes in sources/ and gets summarised up. |
| people/name.md | How you know them, the last few exchanges, the open move | The deal itself. That belongs to the project. |
| decisions/ | The choice, the alternatives, and the reasoning at the time | Anything you would be able to reconstruct later anyway |
| reference/records/ | Dashboards and status rollups | Anything typed by hand. These are derived, always, or they drift from their source. |
The one rule that carries the most weight is the last one. The moment you hand-edit a summary view, you have two versions of the truth and no way to tell which is current. Every rollup should be regenerated from the project files, never maintained beside them.
Why this template is smaller than the ones you have seen
Most templates are generous. They give you tags, statuses, priority fields, nested areas, and a dozen views. Each of those is a decision you now have to make every single time you add something, and multiplied across a year that is the entire maintenance burden that kills the system. A template's real cost is not the setup. It is the per-item judgment it demands forever after.
Before adding a field to this template, ask what breaks if it is missing. If the honest answer is "nothing, it would just be neater", leave it out. Neatness has a weekly cost and no payoff.
The part a template cannot give you
A structure is not a system. Copy these folders and you have an empty filing cabinet, which is the state every abandoned second brain was in on day one. What makes it a working personal operating system is the layer that puts things into it without being asked: mail and meetings landing in the right project, closed projects archiving themselves, the decision log filling up because you talked about a decision rather than because you opened a file.
That is the difference between this template and a Notion template, and it is not a knock on Notion. It is that the filing has to be done by something, and if the template does not come with that something, the answer is you. The build order for the rest is in how to build a personal operating system, and the underlying argument for plain files over a database is in markdown notes versus a database.
Adapting it
Two changes are worth making, and almost nothing else is. If your work is dominated by recurring commitments to other people, promote follow-ups to their own top-level file rather than leaving them inside projects, as in the decision log pattern. If you run many small projects rather than a few large ones, let projects be single files instead of folders until one of them earns a folder. Both of those are responses to real pressure. Adding a tagging scheme is not.
The template, and the thing that fills it
The book builds this structure and the assistant that keeps it current, one working piece at a time, with every prompt printed.
Get the bookWhat it looks like running
A working version of exactly this layout, filled and kept current from real email and meetings. Try the demo.
See the demo