Notes, tasks and the activity trail
Three kinds of record that look alike and are not, and the one of them that is the only honest measure of whether anybody is actually working a case.
Open any enquiry and there are three places history can be written, sitting almost on top of each other. Telling them apart is not pedantry — two workflows in this org make an expensive decision based on which one they read.
| Record | What it is | In this org |
|---|---|---|
| Note | What a person observed. Free text, written by somebody who was there. | 46 |
| Task | What somebody must do, with a status and a date. | 18 |
| Activity | What the system recorded happening. Written automatically. | 960 |
Note
- What it is
- What a person observed. Free text, written by somebody who was there.
- In this org
46
Task
- What it is
- What somebody must do, with a status and a date.
- In this org
18
Activity
- What it is
- What the system recorded happening. Written automatically.
- In this org
960
The activity log is mostly machines
Of 960 activities, about 97% are records of something being updated — by a sync, by a workflow, by a score being written back. Almost none of it is a human doing anything.
This is why nothing in this org measures attention with updated_at. A record can be touched forty times a week by automation and abandoned by every person in the building. The daily sweep in The morning sweep: what has gone quiet and the old-list workflow both ask when somebody last wrote a note instead, and fall back to when the enquiry was created if nobody ever has.
A note is the human's fingerprint. It is the one record type in the product that only exists because a person decided to write something down.
How much of the pipeline has one
| Of the enquiries in your org | How many |
|---|---|
| Carry a note somebody wrote | 45 of 96 |
| Carry a task somebody has to do | 18 of 96 |
| Carry neither | 51 |
Carry a note somebody wrote
- How many
45 of 96
Carry a task somebody has to do
- How many
18 of 96
Carry neither
- How many
51
Sit with that middle row for a moment. Most of the open cases in this business have nothing anybody is committed to doing about them — no owner, no date, no next action. They are not lost, they are not won, and nobody would notice if they were never touched again.
What a task actually is here
A task is the smallest promise in the product: a title, a person, a date, and a status. This org has 11 kinds of them, and each kind carries its own set of statuses rather than sharing one list:
| Task type | Its own statuses |
|---|---|
| General | planning · pending · in_progress · completed · cancelled |
| Call | scheduled · in_progress · completed · no_answer · cancelled |
draft · scheduled · sent · replied · cancelled | |
| Meeting | scheduled · confirmed · in_progress · completed · cancelled |
General
- Its own statuses
planning · pending · in_progress · completed · cancelled
Call
- Its own statuses
scheduled · in_progress · completed · no_answer · cancelled
- Its own statuses
draft · scheduled · sent · replied · cancelled
Meeting
- Its own statuses
scheduled · confirmed · in_progress · completed · cancelled
That matters more than it sounds. “No answer” is a real outcome of a call and a meaningless outcome of an email, so the two cannot share a status list. It is also what lets a workflow ask a precise question after a delay — Booking the meeting, and chasing the no-show waits out an appointment and then re-reads exactly this field to find out whether somebody turned up.
One record's trail
The enquiry you opened in Inside one enquiry: value, stage, source, next step carries both:
Note: Advisor meeting done at the Gurugram branch. Wants to compare two offers before deciding.
Task: Share the offer comparison — pending
Read them in that order and you have the whole of CRM in two lines. Somebody wrote down what they learnt, and somebody committed to what happens because of it. Everything the rest of this course automates is one of those two things — observing, or committing.
Change one thing — leave a trace
- Find an open enquiry with neither a note nor a task. There are plenty.
- Write a note on it in the words an advisor would use — what you would want the next person to know.
- Raise one task against it, of the right type, with a date.
- Come back to that record after Module 3 and check whether the morning sweep would still consider it quiet. It will not, and you will know exactly why.
Try it
- Decide what you would tell a client's team about when to write a note versus when to raise a task. Two sentences.
- Work out what would happen to the sweep's list if somebody wrote “no change” as a note on every quiet enquiry every Monday. That is not a hypothetical.
That is the org. A board, the records under it, the people on them, what is being sold and where the human trail is kept. Next: The three parts of a workflow — and from here on, everything reads or writes one of the things you have just looked at.
Related lessons
Base rates — what a piece of evidence is actually worth
A face-recognition system that is 99.9% accurate and almost entirely wrong, and a number that sent an innocent woman to prison. Both are the same arithmetic, and it is the arithmetic that decides what any piece of evidence is worth.
ReadConfirmation and survivorship — what you never looked for
Two questions about evidence you did not go looking for. One is a rule you have to discover, and one is a pattern in five famous people — and in both, the thing that would have told you the truth is the thing nobody checks.
ReadLoss aversion, sunk cost and regression — what it costs you
Four questions you answer about yourself rather than about a scenario, and your own answers are the finding. Then the pattern that makes praise look useless and criticism look like it works, whatever you actually do.
Read