Folios
A Folio is the home for one thread of your life or work — Therapy, Marketing, Q3 Strategy, a reading list. Whatever the focused thing is, it gets a Folio.
What lives inside a Folio
Three kinds of content, woven together: notes, tasks, and references. Notes are the long-form writing — meeting notes, journal entries, brainstorm dumps, drafts. Tasks are the actionable items, most often created by highlighting text inside a note and converting it directly. References show the connections something has out into the world, both outward to other places and inward from things that point back.
If folders in a normal app are filing-cabinet drawers, Folios are more like studios. Each one has a name, a color, and a sense of place.
The color dot
Every Folio has a colored dot — one of eight earth-tone colors. You choose the color when you create the Folio, or keep the default.
Slate, cerulean, forest, gold, terracotta, bark, dusty rose, plum. That dot follows the Folio throughout the app — note cards, task rows, dashboard surfaces, the Connection Map. Whenever something appears out of context, the dot reminds you which thread it belongs to. After a while, you stop reading the names. Marketing is gold. Therapy is terracotta.
Creating a Folio
Click New Folio. Give it a name, pick a color, add a description if you want, and you're done. There's no template wizard and no nested setup — the point is to make creating a new thread of work feel simple.
References
On a note, the References tab brings together three things: external URLs you've pasted in, other notes in your workspace you've picked from the editor, and backlinks — every note that points to this one, appearing automatically, never added by hand.
On a task, References holds external URL links only. There's no note-to-note picker and no backlinks. The task's automatic link back to its parent note is shown separately, on the task itself.
The Folio detail page
Clicking a Folio opens its detail page: a header with the name, color dot, optional description, and a continuity line showing where you last left off. The notes inside, shown as a list with sub-notes nested under their parent. The tasks inside, shown as rows with a status ring and due date. A Connection Map on the right, which you can open or close.
The Folio detail page is the landing surface for the thread, not the place for deep editing. Clicking a note opens the quick note editor. Clicking a task opens the Tasks page with that task selected. The one thing you can do without leaving the Folio is change a task's status from the row itself.
Sub-notes
Inside a Folio, a note can have child notes nested underneath it — one level only. Child notes cannot have grandchildren. This is useful when one note acts as a hub: a project overview with separate detail notes underneath, or a meeting series with one note per session.
- A child note must live in the same Folio as its parent.
- Moving the parent to a different Folio moves the children too.
- Moving a child to another Folio un-nests it.
- Archiving the parent un-nests the children.
Shelves
When you have many Folios, you can sort them into shelves in the sidebar — a labeled group ("Work," "Personal," "Side projects") that holds several Folios underneath. You drag a Folio onto a shelf to file it there.
Shelves have colored dots too, from the same eight-color palette. They're collapsible, and default to collapsed on mobile. They're entirely optional — ignore them and your sidebar stays a flat list. Deleting a shelf doesn't delete the Folios inside it; they just become unsorted and show up at the top of the sidebar.
Folios vs. tags
| Folio | Tag |
|---|---|
| Structure | Overlay |
| An item lives in one Folio at a time | An item can carry many tags |
| Has visual identity — color, name, place in sidebar | Just a name |
| Where something belongs | What something is about |
| Appears in the sidebar | Discovered through autocomplete and the tag filter |
In practice, you reach for a Folio when you want to focus — "I'm working on Marketing for an hour." You reach for a tag when you want to slice across — "show me everything tagged Q3 across all my Folios." See the full Tags page for more.
Archive vs. delete
Folios get archived when they're done. Archive moves the Folio out of your sidebar into a separate Archive page, but keeps everything inside it intact and searchable. You can un-archive any time and the Folio reappears.
Delete is more destructive — it removes the Folio itself, and asks what you want to do with what was inside. Keep the notes and tasks, and they become unfiled — they keep existing, just without a Folio home; you can assign them elsewhere or leave them as loose content. Or delete them along with the Folio in one action. There's no default; the choice is always yours to make in the moment.
Archive when something's done but might come back. Delete when the Folio itself was a mistake or a duplicate.
When to create a new Folio
When a new thread of attention enters your life. A new project at work. A new client. A new course. A new book. A trip you're planning. You don't need one for a one-off note — those live unfiled or in the closest existing Folio.