Should meeting notes go in a notebook or a tracker table?

TrackHeros has two places for what a client's meetings keep coming back to: notebooks and trackers. This answer is for freelancers and consultants deciding which one a subject belongs in, for meetings held on Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. The short version: a notebook is for reading, a tracker is for looking a value up. Trackers are described in full on trackers.

What is the difference between a notebook and a tracker?

A notebook is a per-client collection organised by topic and written to be read. A tracker is a table with typed columns, written to be looked up, where every cell keeps the history of its values.

	Notebook	Tracker
Holds	Summaries, action items, transcript excerpts, your notes	Rows and typed columns you define
Organised by	Topic, such as "the production deployment"	Row (a feature, a candidate, a deal), or one row per meeting
What stays current	A running "where things stand", in prose	Each cell, with every earlier value kept
Answers	"What has happened with the migration?"	"When is go-live now, and who moved it?"
You read it	Top to bottom, before a call	One cell at a time, or filtered

When should I use a notebook?

When the subject is a story rather than a set of values. A notebook suits a topic that runs across many calls, such as a migration, a redesign or a disputed invoice, where what matters is the context: who raised it, what was tried, and what the client said about it.

Its running summary of where things stand is the page to read before the next call. Each excerpt links back to the meeting it came from, and you can add notes of your own.

When should I use a tracker?

When the question you keep asking has a short answer that changes. A candidate's salary expectation, a feature's status, a change request's cost and a deal's stage are each a cell, and a tracker keeps that cell current as meetings mention it.

A table can also be filtered in ways prose cannot: to the rows changed recently, the ones changed several times, the ones with a conflict, or the ones waiting for your review. A value that changes at every meeting is the clearest case for a tracker. What a tracker is, from the start, is in what is a meeting tracker?

Can I use a notebook and a tracker for the same subject?

Yes, and they are built not to repeat each other. They are separate features that read the same meetings; the notebook's running summary is written to refer to a tracker's table instead of restating the values in it, for the trackers the notebook's creator can see.

A typical pair for a client project is a notebook called "Launch", holding the excerpts and the narrative, and a project tracker holding each piece of work with its status, owner, deadline and blockers. The notebook says why the date moved. The tracker says what the date is now, who said it, and what it was before.

Are notebooks and trackers kept separate per client?

Yes. Each one belongs to a single client's sealed workspace and reads only that client's meetings. A tracker set up for all your clients keeps a separate table for each of them, with a client label on every row, and never merges two clients' rows.

How that boundary is enforced is on client isolation. Keeping the notes of a client's recurring calls easy to read is covered in recurring client meeting notes.