Meeting notes that find their own project afterwards.

A meeting notes app has one job during the meeting, which is to stay out of the way. It has a second job afterwards, and almost none of them do it: put the notes where you will look for them.

Remlo is built for both halves. You write the meeting into today’s page. The rest happens afterwards without you.

What happens during the meeting

You open Remlo and today’s page is already there, cursor ready. You do not choose a notebook, name a file, or pick a template. Sitting in a meeting is the worst time to make a filing decision, and the app never asks for one.

You type what is said. Short lines. A name, a number, a date that moved.

When something has to be done, you type a checkbox in front of it and keep going. Say the supplier needs the revised drawings by Thursday. That line is a to-do now, and you have not left the sentence.

Somewhere in the notes you name the project. That is the whole filing system.

What happens afterwards

The project page lists the day. Every meeting that named it is there in date order, with every stray line and every to-do that mentioned it. Links point both ways, so you wrote nothing but notes and ended up with a history.

The checkbox is on the To-dos page, next to every other one from every other note. Tick it there or in the meeting note. It is the same to-do either way.

If the drawings wait on someone, move the card on the board to the stage that says so. The stages are yours to name, so waiting on review and not started do not share a column.

Three weeks later someone asks what was agreed about the delivery date. You open the project page and read down.

Why I stopped using one note per meeting

I used to make a new note for every meeting, titled with the date and the people. It looked tidy. I never read any of them again.

A note titled “Tue 14 Oct, Mira and Daniel” is a file you can only find if you remember the date. The thing I actually remember is the project. A meeting note with no connection to the project is a stray, however well it is titled.

So the meeting went into the day I was already writing in, and the project collected it. The notes went from a pile to something I can read in order.

What other apps do well

Obsidian has a meeting template plugin and a huge community of people who have solved this their own way. If you enjoy designing a system, it will give you the one you want, and it is on every platform.

Apple Notes is fast, free, and shared folders work when a team needs the same page. It has no way to show you what points at a note.

Notion handles meetings with a database, a template, and a view per project. It is excellent when a team lives in it. Opening it to type one line, in the first minute of a call, is slower than anything I am willing to do while someone is talking.

Todoist and Things are better task managers than Remlo is. They do not hold the sentence the task came from.

What Remlo does not do

It does not record the call or write a summary. It does not label speakers. It has no calendar, so the invite and the agenda stay in the app you already use. It does not share notes with the people who were in the room.

It does not make an agenda for you. A project page can hold the questions you ask every time. The first lines of a page are a fine standing agenda.

It is a place to write, with links and to-dos that move the writing to where it belongs.

Remlo is native on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, writes with no signal, and syncs through your iCloud. It costs $19 a year with seven days free, or $149 once.

The meeting notes were never the hard part. Finding them was.