Static notes are half a brain. The other half is what is changing: your calendar, your inbox, the channels where decisions actually get made.
MCP connects those the same way it connects Obsidian.
claude mcp add google-workspace uvx workspace-mcp --tools calendarAn OAuth sign-in opens in the browser. Grant read access.
Then the vault can act on it:
Read my calendar for today, log what I committed to in each meeting into my
tasks project, and flag anything without a clear next step.
Email, Slack and Notion connect through their own MCP servers, registered the same way.
Give every connector the narrowest scope that does the job, and prefer read-only wherever the option exists. The brain should read your data, not delete it or send things on your behalf.
Keys, not prompts.
Telling an agent "do not delete this" is a suggestion. It is not a safety setting. If the agent technically can delete a file, empty a folder or send an email, then one day, in some context you did not predict, it will.
Control what is possible at the permission level: read-only tokens, scoped keys,
separate credentials per connector. Then the instruction in your CLAUDE.md is
a preference on top of a boundary, rather than the only thing standing between
your inbox and a bad run.
This applies to your own vault too. See guardrails.
Connect the sources where decisions and commitments live: calendar first, then whichever of email or chat you actually use for work.
Skip the ones that produce volume without signal. A connector that floods the vault with notifications makes every future query worse, because the agent has to read past all of it.