Park and Pickup

The Problem: Attention Residue

You’re deep in a session, making progress. Then you have to stop: dinner, a meeting, bed. “I’ll pick this up tomorrow.”

Tomorrow comes. You open your terminal. “Where was I?”

You scan recent files and git history, trying to reconstruct the thread.

Worse: if you don’t trust yourself to remember, you keep working past a sensible stopping point. Just one more thing. The work expands because the handoff is broken.

Cal Newport, drawing on Sophie Leroy’s research, calls this attention residue: part of your mind keeps running the unfinished task in the background.

The Solution: Park and Pickup

The core insight: separate parking from pickup. Parking does the bookkeeping while the context is fresh; pickup reads it back when you return.

Parking (/park)

At the end of a session, /park has Claude close it out:

• Quality gate. Checks the session’s work before recording it.
• Session log. What happened, key decisions, open loops, files touched, and where to start next time.
• Project doc update. If the session changed a project’s state, its doc in 03 Projects/ is rewritten to match reality.
• At-risk work. Drafts that exist only in the conversation are saved to the vault.
• Reference-graph propagation. When a fact changes (a booking cancelled, a file moved), every note that mentions it is updated, not just the one you had open.
• Open-loop routing. Each unfinished item goes to exactly one place: a dated reminder, this week’s plan, or a project’s task list.
• Fresh-context audit. A separate reviewer agent checks the result. An agent auditing its own work tends to approve it; a fresh one doesn’t share its blind spots.

The psychological payoff is Newport’s shutdown ritual: once the system has it, your brain can let go.

There’s also a quick mode you ask for explicitly. It’s never inferred from a quiet-looking session, and escalates to a full park if the session changed anything worth recording. /checkpoint is an alias for /park.

Pickup (/pickup)

Give /pickup a topic, keyword or file path and it finds the latest matching session, reads the project doc and relevant context files, then summarises what you did last and what’s still open.

Bare /pickup lists your active projects, each with a one-line cue. Pick one and it loads that project’s doc and latest session.

Why the Pair Works

Pickup is fast because park left a structured log and a current project doc behind; park is worth the effort because something reliably reads it back. Together they turn separate conversations into one continuous thread, without relying on Claude (or you) to remember anything.

For exact behaviour, the commands themselves are the reference: park.md and pickup.md.

Daily Rhythm and Extended Breaks

/park handles individual sessions. These commands build on top:

/morning - surface the landscape, catch gaps, open space for what’s on your mind. /afternoon - zoom out, check drift, reprioritise remaining time. /goodnight - close out the day, route undone items, write a daily report.

/hibernate - comprehensive state snapshot before extended breaks (travel, sabbatical). /awaken - restore that context when you return. Bridges the gap between sessions and months-long breaks.

/complete-project - formally close a project and route its artefacts. Prevents zombie projects lingering in 03 Projects/.

This creates nested temporal structure: sessions → days → weeks. Park and pickup is the foundation layer.

alias cc='cd "$VAULT_PATH" && claude'

Series: Claude Code + Obsidian

• Introduction — the concept and why it matters
• Vault and Structure — organising your files
• Context Navigation — how the AI finds what it needs
• Park and Pickup (this post) — session continuity