The Handbook

01Your first week

Don't migrate everything. The fastest way to abandon a new tool is to spend a Sunday importing four years of notes into it and then never open it again.

Instead, for one week:

1. Put today's tasks in Inkwell. Nothing else.
2. Track time on one project. Just one.
3. Write three lines in the journal at the end of each day.

If it has earned its place by Friday, move the rest in. If it hasn't, you have lost a week rather than a weekend, and you can leave with your data — see your data.

If you want the reasoning before the routine, why one notebook beats nine tabs makes the case.

02Workspaces

A workspace is one notebook. Most people need exactly one: your job, your freelance clients, and your side projects all live in it together, because that's how your week actually works.

Create a second workspace only when the wall is real:

• You want separate billing.
• You collaborate with people who must never see the other work.
• You are keeping a client's data at arm's length for contractual reasons.

The workspace owner is the person who pays. Members can see billing status but only the owner can change the plan.

03Capture — the only habit that matters

Everything else in Inkwell is optional. This isn't. Press ⌘K (or Ctrl K) from anywhere and the command palette opens. Type what you want.

Anything you capture without a home lands in the Inbox. Empty it once a day; each item becomes a task, a note, or nothing. “Nothing” is the most underrated outcome.

04Projects and clients

A project is a body of work with an end. A clientis someone who pays you for one or more of them. Side projects have no client, and that's fine — leave the field empty.

Milestones

Break a project into milestones when someone else is waiting on it. Milestones are what a client sees in their portal, so write them in the client's language, not yours: “Homepage ready to review”, not “refactor hero component”.

Comments

Every task, milestone, document and meeting takes comments. Each comment is either internal or client-visible, and you choose which. Internal is the default — you have to opt in to being seen.

05Time, invoices and expenses

Start a timer from the command palette or the Time screen. It keeps running across page loads and devices, so closing a laptop doesn't lose an afternoon.

Invoicing a client

1. Track time against a project so you know the hours.
2. Open Finance → Invoices and create an invoice for the client.
3. Enter the amount and hours — the tracked total is right there to copy from.
4. Send it. The invoice appears in the client's portal.

Expenses

Log expenses against a project to see true margin rather than revenue. A project that billed well and cost more is worth knowing about before you take the next one like it.

06Docs, boards and the mind-map

Three different tools for three different kinds of thinking:

• Docs — writing that has to be read by someone else. Attach them to a project, and share them with a client if you want to.
• Boards — an infinite canvas for when the shape of the idea isn't a list. Drawings autosave; there is no save button.
• Mind-map — how everything connects. Useful when you have lost the thread of a project and need to see it from above.

You can drag in .docx and .xlsxfiles and read them without leaving Inkwell. We render them for preview; we don't convert or take them over.

07Journal, habits and goals

The parts of Inkwell nobody else sees. They exist because “how the work is going” and “how you are going” are the same question wearing different clothes.

• Journal — three lines beats three paragraphs you never write. Yesterday's entry appears when you open today's.
• Habits — track the handful that hold everything else up. Five is plenty; twelve is a second job.
• Goals — quarterly, not lifelong. Link them to projects so progress moves on its own.

08Client portals

A portal is a private page for one client. They sign in and see exactly what you have marked client-visible: milestones, shared documents, invoices, and a message thread with you. Nothing else. Not your other clients, not your notes, not your rates.

Inviting a client

1. Open the client and add their email.
2. Send the portal invitation. They get a link to set a password.
3. They land in their portal and nowhere else — a portal account cannot reach the main app.

Before you invite someone, walk their portal yourself.Everything is private by default, but it's worth seeing what they will see.

09The AI sidekick

Inkwell's sidekick can summarise, draft, and answer questions using the notes you point it at. It's built in — nothing to set up and no API key to manage. Free includes 30 assists a month; paid plans are unlimited.

• Nothing leaves until you ask. The sidekick is a deliberate action, not a background process.
• Your content is never used for training — ours or the model provider's.
• It will be confidently wrong sometimes. Check anything before it reaches a client.

10Keyboard shortcuts

Press G then a letter to go somewhere. No modifier.

The full list lives in Settings → Keyboard shortcuts.

11Your data, and leaving

Export everything from Settings → Data, whenever you like, without asking us. Notes come out as Markdown, structured data as JSON, attachments as files.

Deleting your account is permanent. Export first. We keep your content for 30 days in case you change your mind, then it is gone from production and ages out of backups within a further 90 days — as described in the Privacy Policy.

12When you're stuck

Write to thekodevs@gmail.com. A person reads it. Tell us what you were trying to do and what happened instead — that pair of sentences solves most tickets on the first reply.

Found a security issue? Report it here instead.