Of all the requests I receive, this is the most frequent and the most reasonable: "what's missing is a way to organize notes into projects or folders". It comes from people who use Itomori every day and who have every reason to ask for it.
I've decided no. Not "not now", which is the polite way of saying "maybe": no. And since it's a decision that affects the people who use it, it seems only fair to explain it in full instead of leaving it implicit in a feature that never arrives.
The question that costs more than it seems
Folders look free. They're not: they have a price, and you pay it all at once at the worst possible moment. Every time you save something, before saving it, you have to answer a question — where do I put it?
That question arrives when a thought has just been born and lasts only a few seconds. It moves you from having the idea to cataloguing it: two different activities, and the second snuffs out the first. In the car, walking, standing in line at the post office, it's enough to make you say "I'll write it down later". Then you don't.
I built Itomori precisely to remove that question. Putting it back would mean putting back the very problem the product exists to solve.
And there is no right answer anyway
There's a second reason, more technical and just as mundane: does a note about a project with a client in the wine business go in "Projects", "Clients" or "Wine"?
Whichever folder you choose today, three months from now you'll look for it in the other one. It isn't disorganization: it's that an idea lives in several places at once, and a hierarchy allows only one. The mechanism — why folders fail and what works in their place — I described in full here. This article is about the decision, not the mechanism.
What people really ask for isn't folders
This is the part that convinced me more than any other, and I got it by rereading the messages.
People who ask for folders almost never want to sort. They want to find things again — and they don't trust the system to do it for them. It's a request for trust disguised as a feature request. A folder is reassuring because it's a gesture you know: you make it yourself, so you know it's there.
If that's how things stand, adding folders doesn't solve the problem: it hides it. Solving it means making search and connections so good that the question never comes up. If I can't manage that, the flaw is mine, and folders would be an elegant way of not admitting it.
What's there instead
Three things, and none of them asks you to decide anything before saving.
Search by meaning. Ask "what did I say about the price" and it finds the note where you talked about "how much to charge for it", which doesn't contain the word "price" at all.
Linked notes. At the bottom of every note are the others that talk about the same thing. You didn't link them: they were found.
Tags, which here aren't labels. They come from the note instead of being chosen beforehand, and they're for connecting, not for filing — that's the whole difference.
What could make me change my mind
A decision without a condition that could disprove it is a prejudice. So I'll state it: if many people arrived with hundreds of notes and search proved insufficient — when measured — the discussion would reopen.
But it would reopen around "grouping by meaning", that is, something Itomori does for you — not around folders to fill by hand. The difference isn't one of form: it's about who does the work.
Why I'm writing this instead of staying quiet
Because a feature that doesn't arrive, with no explanation, looks like an oversight, and this isn't one. And because a product is also chosen for what it refuses to do: everyone copies features, nobody copies the method.
If you've read this far and still think you need them, write to me and tell me what you'd put in them. Not to make me change my mind about folders — on those I'm fairly sure — but because in that story there's almost always a real problem I'm solving badly somewhere else.