The people system
Every person and company page in my system assembles itself. There is no separate CRM: the notes themselves are the database, and each one pulls in everything that touches it live, the moment I open the page.
The mechanism is a link. Any note that involves a person, a meeting record, a message log, a task, links to them. That single link is enough. Every person's page carries an identical block that queries for anything in the system linking back to it, then sorts what it finds into tabs: catch-ups, messages and emails, taste we share, everything else. Nothing is copied onto the page and nothing has to be kept in sync, because nothing is stored there in the first place. It is read live, every time.
The linking happens automatically, at the moment each artefact is created, not as a filing step afterwards. When a transcript gets processed into meeting notes, the people in the room get stamped onto that note in the same pass. When I forward a message thread in, the participants get attached the same way. A daily job reads relevant mail threads and writes a short log entry for each one, tagged with who it involved. When I capture a task that names someone, that task shows up under their open follow-ups. A person's page shows every meeting, every message thread, and everything still outstanding between us that the vault knows about, which is to say everything I captured.
New people get researched, not just filed. The first time someone new appears, a background process picks it up and builds out their page: pulling what is already in my own notes, then supplementing it with public information, so a fresh contact does not sit as a bare name for weeks. Later passes only ever add to a page, never rewrite what is already there, so nothing I have written about someone gets silently overwritten by an automated run.
On top of that sits a freshness layer, which distinguishes actually seeing someone from merely exchanging a message with them, and flags who I am overdue to reach out to against a cadence set per person, rather than one blanket rule for everyone.
I can still write on these pages myself. I edit a person's page whenever I like, exactly as I would any note. Company pages work the same way, on the same one-link principle, with one deliberate exception: a new company record is only ever created on my explicit word, never automatically. Everything else is there because the systems that produced those artefacts already knew who they were about.