Notes you can find again
Writing a note takes a minute. Finding it eight weeks later is the part nobody plans for.
Notebook holds the writing that is not a document and not a task: meeting notes, decisions, research, the thing a client said on the phone. Its failure mode is not losing notes — it is having them and never reading them again.
The title is the whole search problem
You will not remember the contents. You will remember roughly what it was about and roughly when, and search will do the rest — if the title contains the words you would actually type.
"Meeting notes" is unfindable; there are forty of them. "Acme — pricing decision, March" is findable, because every part of it is something you might search for later. Write the title as if for the person you will be in two months, who has forgotten this happened.
Record the decision, not the discussion
Most meeting notes are a transcript of the conversation, which is exactly the part nobody needs later. What people come back for is what was decided, who is doing it, and what was ruled out.
That last one matters more than it looks. Six months on, someone proposes the thing you already rejected, and without a line saying why, you have the same debate again from the start. One sentence — "we chose X over Y because of the delivery date" — saves an hour of a future meeting.
When a note should stop being a note
A note that contains an action should produce a task, right then. Notes are not to-do lists and nobody scans them for commitments.
Likewise, once several people need to change something regularly, it has outgrown a note and belongs in a document or a file. The signal is version drift: two people quoting the same note with different contents means it should have moved a month ago.
Shared notes need an author
A note everyone can edit and nobody owns becomes stale in a way nobody notices, because staleness has no owner either.
Put a name and a date at the top of anything shared — not to assign blame, but so a reader can tell whether they are looking at something current or something someone typed hurriedly last spring.
Questions people actually ask
Why can I never find my old notes?
Because of the titles. You will not recall the contents, only roughly what it was about and when. “Meeting notes” is unfindable; “Acme — pricing decision, March” contains the words you would actually type.
What should meeting notes contain?
What was decided, who is doing it, and what was ruled out — not a transcript. The rejected option matters most: without a line saying why, you will have the same debate from scratch in six months.
When should a note become something else?
The moment it contains an action, make a task — nobody scans notes for commitments. And once several people edit it regularly, it belongs in a document or file rather than a note.
