The things worth asking first.

Remembering the things your work runs on: what you agreed, what you owe people, and who you are about to meet. It reads your own notes and your own calendar, and answers from them.

ChatGPT remembers you inside ChatGPT, and it cannot see your calendar or your notes. The useful question is rarely "what does this document say," it is "what did I promise Sarah, and when do I next see her." That needs your notes and your schedule in one place, and it needs to show you where the answer came from.

It is also yours: plain files you export in one click, rather than rows in someone else's database.

No. Filing is the thing that kills note systems. Forward, talk, photograph, or paste, and the organising happens on our side. People and open loops are found in your writing rather than entered by you.

It answers only from your own notes and shows the sources for every claim, so you can check. If you never wrote something down, it tells you that instead of guessing. An assistant that invents details about your life is worse than none, because you would not know which parts to trust.

Reads it, and only reads it. We ask Google for a single permission, calendar.readonly, and never for Gmail, Drive, or Contacts. Any calendar that publishes a secret feed link works too, with no Google account at all.

No. Never pooled with other users, never used for training. AI providers process your content under commercial terms that prohibit training on it.

Your notes are not touched. Export keeps working, and capture keeps running for 30 days so nothing you forward in during a gap is lost. Answers and briefs stop until you come back.

Yes: Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, and Apple Notes. Attachments do not carry across, which is worth knowing before you move. The full import guide is here.

Yes. The dashboard works in a phone browser, and the two things you actually want on a phone, talking at it and photographing something, are built for that.

Hivetivity, run by Ryan Hall, who has spent 25 years building marketing and automation systems for B2B companies. It started as the system he ran his own working life on, and it still runs on his notes every morning.