The four-way test
- Does someone need to reply? It is a message.
- Does someone need to do it by a date? It is a task.
- Did the system or a person perform a step worth logging? It is an activity.
- Is it a file with a version or a signature? It is a document.
- Is it something you observed? Now it is a note.
Why notes are where work goes to die
The classic failure: a technician writes 'customer wants us to come back and look at the water heater'. Everyone agrees that is useful. Nobody owns it. There is no date. It sits in the job history until the customer calls angry six weeks later, at which point somebody finds the note and it becomes evidence of your process rather than a record of it.
The note was correct and worthless. The same sentence as a task, with an owner and a date, would have produced a callback.
Notes and messages are different layers
Conversation lives in inboxes and threads, with senders, recipients, channels and delivery status. Records carry observations and the events that changed something. Copying every inbound text into a job history turns the history into chat noise and buries the three entries that actually mattered.
The workable pattern is: the conversation stays in the thread, and when it causes something operational — an approval, a reschedule, a scope change — that becomes its own entry on the record.
Notes and documents
- A note can describe a document; it should not be a substitute for storing it.
- Photos and files attach to the record and are referenced, not pasted into the text.
- Anything requiring a signature is a document with a lifecycle, not a note.
- If the note is the only place a commitment exists, the commitment is not documented.