The Practice

Most note tools fail people the same way: they explain their buttons and never say what to do with them. So the notes pile up, the pile stops being trustworthy, and the whole thing gets abandoned. MojoPad ships with a method — small, forgiving, and optional — so the tool tells you what to capture, how to organize it, and when to come back. Four moves, repeated, are the whole practice: capture, make it yours, connect, return.

Choosing a starting shape

The first time a new wiki opens, MojoPad asks how you'll use it and offers four starting shapes: Journal first (write a little each day and let structure emerge), Study & research (Sources and Ideas folders plus a book-notes template), Projects & life (Projects, Areas, Resources and Archive, a project template, and a Status property), or Blank, with a guide. Picking one plants a small working structure: an Inbox folder, a Start Here page that teaches the shape's workflow, and The Field Guide — the practice on one page. Everything planted is ordinary pages and folders. Rename them, rearrange them, delete them; nothing is special or protected.

Already have a wiki? Help ▸ Set Up a Practice… runs the same setup any time, and it is strictly additive — it plants alongside what you have and never renames, replaces, or removes anything. If a folder or page with a planted name already exists, yours is kept.

The Inbox: capture without guilt

Capturing should never interrupt thinking, so captures don't ask for a filing decision — they land in the Inbox folder (web clips land in your clip folder, which counts as inbox too). When something is waiting, today's entry in the Journal shows a quiet 📥 In your inbox card with a count.

Click Triage and MojoPad walks the pile one capture at a time. For each one you make a single decision:

• File it… — pick (or create) a folder; the page moves out of the inbox.
• Let it go — into Recently Deleted, with one-click undo. Half of capturing well is dropping things freely.
• Later — skip it this round; it stays in the queue.

Above the buttons sits one input: “One line in your own words.” Whatever you type is prepended to the page. This is the smallest real act of understanding — a capture in someone else's words is a bookmark; one line in yours makes it knowledge. And when the semantic index knows pages your capture belongs near, triage offers Belongs near chips — click one to connect the two pages in the Graph.

The weekly review: fifteen unhurried minutes

Habits survive on rhythm, not willpower. Once a week the Journal offers ✦ Weekly review — it appears on your review day and waits patiently until you take it or wave it off with ✕ (waving it off rests it until next week; there is no streak to break and no guilt to accrue). Pick the day — or turn the review off — in Settings ▸ Locale & Dates.

The review is six short steps, each skippable with Next:

1. Inbox — the same triage flow, aimed at zero.
2. Loose ends — tasks that have carried forward for more than a week. Still true? Click one to visit the day it came from.
3. Fading — the notes furthest down your forgetting curve. A thirty-second skim resets the clock, or Let it fade retires one with a clear conscience.
4. Orphans — pages nothing links to and that link to nothing. Connect each to a suggested neighbor, or declare it's fine alone.
5. Reflected — your local AI reads the week's journal entries and reflects back the threads and open loops. (This is the one step that needs Local AI; with it off, everything else still works.)
6. Done — finishing stamps a one-line record into today's note and rests the card until next week.

How it works, honestly

The inbox is not a special place — it's whichever folders are named Inbox or match your web-clip folder, so you can make one by hand in any wiki. Filing during triage is the same move as dragging a page into a folder. The fading step reads the same attention data as the Journal's Worth revisiting card; the orphans step reads the same link graph as the Graph view. The practice invents no new machinery — it's a ritual over what your wiki already knows.

Questions people actually have

What if I fall behind? Nothing happens. The inbox holds; the review returns next week. The review's whole design is that it forgives — triage what's there, skip what isn't ripe, and the system is honest again in fifteen minutes.

Can I ignore all of this? Entirely. Skip the setup, never open a review, delete the Inbox folder — MojoPad works exactly as before. The practice is scaffolding, not plumbing.

I picked the wrong shape. Run Help ▸ Set Up a Practice… and pick another; shapes coexist. Delete whatever a shape planted that you don't want.

Does my clip folder have to be the inbox? It counts as inbox so clips get triaged, but filing a clip moves it wherever you choose — the clip folder stays a front door, not a home.