Notes: a place for thoughts that are not tasks yet
Some thoughts arrive as ready tasks. "The Retry button isn't disabled during the request" — it's clear what's broken and how it should work. We put those into the backlog in one line.
Others arrive half-formed: "onboarding feels too long". That's not a task yet. It's unclear what to do, or whether to do anything at all.
The agent does what is written
Give an agent the line "onboarding is too long, fix it" and it will: shorten the texts, drop a couple of steps. Neatly and quickly. Whether that's the work we wanted is another question.
The agent won't suggest waiting and thinking a bit more. It takes the text and does it. So we finish thinking before a thought goes into a prompt.
The backlog is for decisions
We used to put everything into the backlog. Real tasks sat next to half-sentences like "import from Linear — do we need it?". Picking the next task for the agent, we scrolled past them every time and got distracted.
Now the backlog only holds what we've decided to do. Everything else goes to Notes.
Notes is a tab in every project. It's one page of text: no cards, columns or dates. The text saves itself. You can write half a sentence or a question to yourself.
How one line became two tasks
In mid-September a line appeared in the notes of "Platform": "Onboarding: short hints per section instead of one long tour?" We wrote it after talking to someone who closed the welcome tour on the second step and then spent a week not understanding what fields were for.
We didn't give it to the agent. A couple of days later another line appeared under it: "in Fields it's unclear what's the key and what's the value". Then: "an example right in the hint?". Then: "show it once, on the first visit to a section". Each time we came back to it, we added a line.
A week later it was clear there were two tasks, and neither was about the tour. The first: a short hint in each section on the first visit. The second: an example of a field and an include right in those hints. We moved both to the backlog, wrote what the result should be, and deleted the lines from the notes.
If we had given the agent the first version right away, it would have shortened the tour, and we needed something else.
When to move it to the backlog
Sometimes it takes a minute to understand what you want, sometimes a week. Notes have no counters or dates, so a line can stay there as long as it needs.
It's time to move a thought when you can write what the result should be. For example: "on the first visit to a section, a short hint with an example appears". And some lines never become tasks: "import from Linear" wasn't needed once in a month. We just delete those.
If the agent is connected to the board
In PRO the agent works with the board over MCP, and Help has a scenario called "Sort out the notes": the agent reads the notes, suggests tasks and creates only the ones you confirm. The notes stay as they are. It's handy when a lot of small things have piled up.