How to organise meeting notes and personal notes in one place.

Most note systems fail at one of two extremes. Everything disappears into unrelated folders, or everything is poured into one undifferentiated stream. The useful middle is a single record that preserves where each note came from.

Keep the sources distinct

A personal note is something you wrote. A meeting note is a record of what the room established. Preparation is neither. Keeping those labels honest matters: a useful system must never present an assumption made before a call as an outcome agreed during it.

Organise around the work

Folders make you decide the filing system before the thought is clear. Start with an unfiled note, then attach it to the project it supports. Meeting notes already have their natural home: the meeting, its participants, and its numbered session. The organisation follows the work instead of becoming another job.

Append history; do not overwrite it

Recurring meetings change time, title, participants, and substance. Each completed session should append to the series, preserving its own summary, decisions, and actions. Replacing last week's note with this week's version destroys the very history a note system is supposed to protect.

Retrieval is the test

A note is organised when you can find it from what you remember: a project, meeting, decision, action, phrase, or person. The system should return the concise result and a path to the original source, not an unsupported answer detached from its evidence.

The best note structure is the one that preserves truth and gets out of the way.

Frey's Notes room follows this model: structured personal notes, project filing, evidence-backed meeting memory, and one private search across the record. It is note-taking in service of the day, not a second knowledge system to maintain.