Find it again in a year
Stacks, notebooks and tags for the structure. Full-text search for the day you forget where you put it.
Olha translates legal documents for six regular clients. Each has its own terms, its own style, its own bans: one will not accept the word “contract”, another insists on exactly that word. For three years she kept it all in her head and in folders on a drive.
Last year she mixed up the glossaries of two clients. The mistake was caught on the client’s side. Nothing terrible happened, but Olha understood that her head was no longer enough.
Every client has a notebook
Now the first thing Olha opens in the morning is the notebook of the client she is working for today. Everything is in it: the glossary, the style guide, disputed decisions with dates. Mixing things up is no longer possible, because there is nothing from anyone else in that notebook.
The term everybody needs
But part of what she knows belongs to no single client. How to translate “indemnity” Olha decided once, for everyone. Such notes carry a tag and can be found from any notebook. The structure does not get in the way when knowledge cuts across projects.
Found a year later
In March a client asked why she had translated a term differently in a 2024 contract. Olha found the note with the explanation in a minute, by a phrase she remembered. The explanation had been written back then, with a date and a link to the email.
The situation is familiar to anyone who works for several clients.
Product launch plan
Bring the product story, research, and decisions into one notebook.
Next stepsConceptual interface with demonstration data. Explore the notes above.
How it works, step by step
Three levels, and that is enoughTag what cuts across notebooksSearch by the phrase you rememberPin what you open every dayRearrange without losing anythingThree levels, and that is enough
Kartoteq has stacks, notebooks inside them and notes inside notebooks. You cannot nest deeper, and that is deliberate: at the fourth level folders stop helping. Olha, a translator, keeps a stack called “Clients”, a notebook for each client inside it, and in each notebook the notes: glossary, style guide, correspondence about disputed terms.
Start with one notebook. Make a stack when you have more than five notebooks and the list no longer reads at a glance.
Tag what cuts across notebooks
A notebook answers “whose project is this”. A tag answers “what else is this about”. A note on the term “acceptance certificate” sits in one client’s notebook, but with the tag “legal/contracts” it turns up during work for another client too.
Tags in Kartoteq are hierarchical: “legal/contracts”, “legal/courts”. Open the parent tag and you see the notes of all its children. Do not tag every note with everything: two or three tags you will really use.
Search by the phrase you remember
Full-text search goes through titles, note text and the text inside PDF and DOCX attachments. Olha remembers that some contract mentioned an “irrevocable guarantee”. She types two words and gets the note with the attached PDF where that phrase is on page three.
Results can be narrowed by notebook, tag or date. If you keep searching for the same thing, do not repeat it every time: save the search.
Pin what you open every day
A pinned note stays at the top of its notebook. For Olha that is “Current deadlines”: one table showing what is due this week. A saved search “tag: question to client, without tag: closed” shows everything she is still waiting an answer for.
For people who do not want a separate to-do app this is enough. The structure stays light, and the things you need are one click away.
Rearrange without losing anything
A note can be dragged into another notebook, a notebook into another stack. Links between notes do not break: they point at the note itself, not at its address. When one of Olha’s clients closed the project, she moved the notebook into the “Archive” stack and rewrote nothing.
A good structure comes from use, not from a plan. Move things when something could not be found twice. That is enough.
Where to go next
Consulting: back into a client project in ten minutes, not a morningChanging note apps without carrying the clutter
Start with one notebook.
The Personal plan is free: notes, files and search. AI and shared notebooks can be added later, when a project needs them.
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