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How people use Fabric

Your data, one place, actually yours

Most people's digital life is scattered across feudal kingdoms. Google holds the email. Apple holds the photos. Notion holds the notes. Dropbox holds some files, Google Drive holds others, and the rest live in Slack threads you'll never find again. You don't own your digital life so much as rent space in a dozen different ecosystems that don't talk to each other.

Fabric is built on a different idea. One place where everything lives, connects, and becomes searchable by meaning. Not just a notes app or a file manager but something closer to a personal server: a layer that sits above all your existing tools, pulls them together, and adds intelligence on top.

Unlike most productivity tools, it doesn't come with a prescribed workflow. It accepts almost any kind of content (notes, files, links, PDFs, screenshots, voice memos, emails), organises it automatically, and makes it searchable by what things mean rather than what you called them. What you do with that is up to you.

The AI at the centre of it learns through every interaction, every file, every save. Not a generic assistant you share with everyone. Yours, specifically, getting smarter about how you work and what matters to you.

Most people start with one use case and find it expanding from there. The patterns below reflect how different people have made it work for them. None of them are the right way. They're starting points.

The second brain

The most common starting point. Capture everything interesting: articles you want to read, ideas you have in the shower, research for projects, screenshots of things that inspired you, voice memos from your commute, notes from books you've finished. Let Fabric tag and organise it. Search it later when you need to find a connection or reference something.

The key difference from earlier second brain approaches (Evernote, Notion, Obsidian) is the maintenance burden. Traditional second brain systems require you to organise on the way in: choose a folder, apply tags, decide where things go. Fabric handles that. You dump, it files. This sounds like a small thing until you've abandoned three previous note-taking systems because the filing got too onerous to keep up.

The web clipper captures articles and pages from the browser. Email-to-note pulls things in from email. Voice notes work for ideas on the go. Screenshots sync from your phone automatically. The result, over months, is a library that grows with you without demanding ongoing curation.

When you need something, search by what it means rather than what you called it. "That thing about dopamine and motivation I read last year" finds the article. "Notes from the conversation about the pricing model" finds the meeting notes.

The research library

Students, academics, journalists, and independent researchers tend to use Fabric as a place to collect everything related to a topic or project. PDFs of papers, web clips of relevant articles, annotated passages, interview notes, datasets, images, and their own thinking all live in the same searchable space.

The practical shift is in how research actually works. Instead of maintaining separate folders for sources, notes, and drafts, everything goes into Fabric and gets organised by the AI. When you're writing, you search for what you need and pull it across. The AI assistant can answer questions about your own collected material, which is particularly useful for synthesis: "What do these five papers say about working memory in ADHD?" is a question Fabric can answer from your library.

Annotations and highlights let you mark the important passages in PDFs and notes, and every annotation is searchable. So is every highlighted passage, which means your whole annotated library is findable by content rather than by where you remember putting something.

The project workspace

For people managing multiple active projects simultaneously (freelancers, consultants, agencies, indie hackers, anyone with a varied portfolio of work), Fabric works well as a place to keep all the materials for each project together.

A typical project workspace might contain: a brief or scope document, meeting notes from client calls, reference materials gathered during research, drafts of deliverables in various states, and a canvas showing the project structure and outstanding work. Everything about that project lives in one place rather than scattered across email, a cloud drive, a separate notes app, and a project tracker.

This is the Fabric interpretation of the PARA method's Projects category. The difference from a folder on Google Drive is that Fabric's search understands the content of what's inside. Finding the note where you discussed the brand tone with the client doesn't require remembering which folder you put it in.

Connected services add more without requiring you to move files. Google Drive, Dropbox, and Notion documents all appear in Fabric search without you uploading copies. The project folder is a single point of access for materials that actually live in various places.

The creative archive

Designers, writers, photographers, filmmakers, music creators, and other creative people use Fabric as a place to accumulate and organise inspiration and reference material.

The pattern: clip images from the web (Behance, Dribbble, Instagram, anywhere), save screenshots of things that catch your eye, add voice memos about ideas, clip articles about craft and technique. Let the library grow. Browse visually through the canvas to see what's there. Search for "warm colour palettes with geometric shapes" or "writing about grief" and find what you've collected.

For active projects, a canvas serves as a mood board or visual brief. Drop images, links, notes, and references onto the canvas, arrange them spatially, and share with collaborators or clients. The canvas is live, so updates are immediately visible to everyone who has access.

The iOS and Android screenshot sync is particularly useful here: photos and screenshots from your phone appear in Fabric automatically, tagged and searchable, without any manual effort. The things you screenshot because they're interesting stop living in an unnavigable camera roll and become a findable part of your library.

ADHD management

People with ADHD tend to struggle with the maintenance overhead of most productivity tools. The very things that make a system useful (filing, organising, reviewing) require sustained executive function, which is in limited supply. Systems get set up and then fall apart because keeping them running is too demanding.

Fabric's appeal for ADHD users is that the maintenance is largely automated. You capture things (low friction, immediate), the AI organises them (no decision required), and you find them later by searching (no need to remember where you filed anything). The system stays trustworthy without requiring ongoing manual upkeep.

Many ADHD users pair Fabric with a simple task list for the actionable layer and use Fabric for everything else: reference material, ideas, notes, research, project context. The task list handles what to do; Fabric holds the context for doing it.

The voice notes feature is particularly useful. ADHD brains often generate ideas at inconvenient times (in the car, in the shower, mid-conversation). A two-second voice capture that gets transcribed and organised means fewer ideas lost to the gap between having a thought and finding a moment to write it down.

The reading and bookmarking system

Many people's first experience of Fabric is as a replacement for their previous bookmarking system: a browser folder, Pocket, Raindrop, Instapaper. Articles saved, never read. Bookmarks accumulating into an archive of good intentions.

The difference in practice: Fabric's AI understands the content of what you save. You don't have to tag articles as "productivity" or "design" because Fabric knows what they're about. You don't have to remember what you called the article because you can search by what it discussed. And the Recap feature periodically surfaces things you've saved but haven't revisited, which addresses the "save and forget" pattern that makes most read-later tools feel futile.

The web clipper captures the full content of pages, not just URLs, so even when the original page disappears, your saved version remains findable and complete.

Related: Seven inboxes

The memory bank for your AI agents

This is the use case most people haven't thought about yet but will.

Every AI assistant you talk to starts from nothing. ChatGPT doesn't know your projects, your history, your preferences, your prior research. Every conversation begins at zero. You re-explain context, re-upload documents, re-describe what you're working on. The AI is powerful but amnesiac.

Fabric's MCP server changes this. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the standard that lets AI agents read and write to external systems. When Claude, ChatGPT, or any MCP-compatible AI agent connects to your Fabric, it gets access to your entire library: your notes, your saved articles, your research, your project context, your meeting notes. Not a generic knowledge base. Yours, specifically.

The practical result is that you stop having to re-explain yourself. Ask your AI assistant about a project and it already knows what you've been working on. Ask it to draft something in the context of your previous decisions and it has them. Ask it to find connections between ideas you've captured over months and it can actually do that, because the material is there.

This is what "personal AI" actually means. Not a chatbot you share with everyone. An AI with persistent memory of your work, your thinking, and your context, that gets more useful the more you use Fabric.

The CLI extends this to the terminal for developers: search your Fabric library with natural language from the command line, pipe content into other tools, or integrate it into your own workflows.

Related: For developers

Founders, investors, sales teams, and lawyers often deal with a specific problem: large volumes of documents, notes, and communications that need to be quickly navigable under time pressure. Due diligence materials. Research on companies. Call notes. Term sheets. Investor updates.

Fabric's combination of semantic search, connected services, and AI-assisted Q&A suits this well. "What were the key concerns from the last board call?" or "Find everything we have on this company" work as natural language queries across your whole library. The canvas works for mapping deal flow or structuring analysis spatially before writing it up.

For anything that needs sharing externally (a data room, a press kit, a published resource for clients), Fabric's publishing feature turns a folder into a shareable, searchable webpage in one click.

The team knowledge base

For small teams, Fabric serves as a shared workspace where collective knowledge lives. Meeting recordings and notes, project documentation, client materials, research, templates, reference guides. The AI search means new team members can find context for decisions made months ago without having to ask someone.

The sharing and publishing features let you make specific content public (a client-facing resource page, a press kit, a published knowledge base) while keeping the rest private. You can onboard a collaborator by sharing a specific folder rather than your entire workspace.

For teams that already use Google Drive, Dropbox, or Notion, Fabric works alongside rather than requiring a migration. Connected services are searchable from Fabric without moving files. The team can start using Fabric as a layer over existing infrastructure rather than as a replacement for it.

Starting out

The most common mistake with Fabric is trying to set up a complete system before using it. You don't need to decide your folder structure, create all your spaces, or figure out exactly how you'll use each feature before you start. Fabric is designed to grow organically.

Start by capturing things you'd normally lose: the article you're reading now, the idea you just had, the screenshot that seemed useful. Install the web clipper. Set up the mobile app. Forward a few emails. Let the library start building.

After a couple of weeks, patterns will emerge naturally: the kinds of things you capture most, the projects that would benefit from a dedicated space, the searches you keep running. Use those patterns to add structure where it helps, and leave everything else to the AI.

The structure will emerge. You don't have to plan it.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to organise things when I save them?

No. Fabric's AI handles tagging and categorisation automatically. You can add your own tags and put things in specific spaces if you want more control, but you don't have to. Saving something and letting Fabric organise it is a perfectly valid workflow.

Can I use Fabric alongside my existing tools?

Yes, and most people do. Fabric connects to Google Drive, Dropbox, Notion, Readwise, and more. Content from connected services is searchable from Fabric without you moving or copying anything. Fabric works as a layer over your existing setup rather than requiring you to migrate everything.

What's the difference between a Space and a Canvas?

A Space is a container for organising related content, similar to a folder but searchable and AI-organised. A Canvas is an infinite visual workspace for thinking, planning, and presenting, where you can arrange content spatially and add diagrams, sticky notes, and connections. Both live in Fabric and can contain any type of content.

Is Fabric good for team use?

Yes. You can share specific spaces or folders with collaborators at different permission levels, collaborate in real time on canvases, annotate and comment on documents, and publish content publicly. For small teams, Fabric can replace the combination of a shared drive and a note-taking tool.

How is Fabric different from Notion?

The main practical difference is maintenance overhead. Notion is powerful but requires you to build and maintain your own structure: databases, templates, page hierarchies. Fabric handles organisation automatically through AI. If you want full structural control, Notion gives you more options. If you want something that organises itself while you work, Fabric asks less of you. The comparison page covers this in more detail.

Where should I start?

Install the web clipper and save something you're reading right now. Then set up the mobile app. Start capturing, and let the rest develop from use rather than planning.