Keeping structured notes

Is there a way to add notes in Wrike?

I'm thinking of a scenario where I am in a meeting with a customer and I just want to pop open Wrike and write the minutes then and there and later save these in a sensible form in a project or a folder. I don't want to create tasks, because there's already enough of those and I don't want to attach externally created files, because that kills the simplicity. I can't just write a comment on the project either, because who will go through all of those to find "all customer meeting summaries".

I think I might be missing something obvious. What's the best practice?

Kindly,
Alexander

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Permanently deleted user

Hi Alexander, thank you for posting here! As a best practice, we do recommend creating tasks for meeting notes. We usually have a Subfolder for these, so that they wouldn't mix with other tasks and could be filtered out if needed. If they do need to be linked to another task, they can be added there as a subtask. Tasks for meeting notes are especially useful when you want to compile an agenda beforehand, and then check the points off as you go along, as well as adding additional info about whatever was discussed. If you want to draw your team's attention to any results of the meeting, you can @mention them right in the same task.

We're always open to hearing your feedback though, and I'd love to hear about any solutions you envision. Do you think there should be a separate section for notes in tasks, Folders, or perhaps in a completely different view of Wrike? Looking forward to learning more!

Alexander Filatov

Hi Anastasia,

Thanks for a quick reply!

The issue that's bugging me a bit is when Wrike is both as a wiki and a project management tool. Perhaps I'm just not used to "everything is a task" approach, but when Wrike is used as a wiki, then why would you want to have every piece of information as a task with statuses and workflows? Especially if you combine this with project management that actually requires having statuses and workflows.

So basically, I (along with my team and the rest of the small company) need to figure out a way to create "note tasks" and then be able to filter them out when reviewing work in progress, timelines etc. It feels like an unnecessary nuisance, no?

I don't mean to sound like I'm bashing down on this I just can't get my head around how to make this so simple that people in my team don't cringe whenever they need to take meeting notes.

Perhaps my feature request would be to have the ability to create simple documents alongside with the attachment feature. Those who wish to create meeting minutes tasks may go ahead with that, but those who wish to document meeting notes as an attachment without leaving Wrike could do that there. Slap on basic text editing (bold, italic, bullets, links) like in the comment here and that's it

Permanently deleted user

Alexander, thank you for following up! I appreciate the feedback you shared here and I'll go ahead and move this post over to the Product Feedback section, I think it has some useful insights for our team and other users to see.

In the meantime, I wanted to share how we approach this in our team. We have many internal knowledge base articles stored in a designated Folder, and these articles take the form of tasks. They are backlogged (don't have dates), and generally have an active status. Some of the tasks fall under a special workflow, and in this case, they have statuses such as "Read Only", which can easily be filtered out when you want to exclude them from Reports or other views. As for meeting notes, my team has a special Folder called "Weekly Meetings". This Folder is located in our department's structure, but doesn't mix with locations which include actionable tasks and Projects. We all know where we can find the task for this week's meeting and include anything we want to add to the agenda. Then we can always go back and check out the points we discussed and the notes we made during any prior meetings. Hope this approach will be helpful for your team too, and please let me know if there's anything I can clarify, I'll be happy to help.

Alexander Filatov

Ah, I see! Well, we're still evaluating Wrike on a Professional license, so we haven't had the luxury of trying different statuses yet. Yet another argument to push to the next tier!

What about "My Work" view? As far as I can see it cannot be filtered (perhaps it can in Business, I don't know). So we're having issues with everything being bunched up there. One of the annoying things is that it shows each task _and_ it's sub-tasks that I am assigned to. I just need the task. Add in these meeting tasks in there and a bunch of other stuff and it's an unusable demotivating jungle. (And yes, I've tried the Labs version of the view, it's only marginally better)

Sorry, this might be derailing the original post. Let me know if I should open a new complai... I mean thread

Permanently deleted user

Alexander, it's always great to see people reaching out to the Community to learn more when they're just setting their workflows up in Wrike, so I'm happy to help out with that. Something I usually recommend using alongside or in place of My Work, in cases when more customization is needed, is the Dashboard View. You can create widgets based on dates, statuses, assignees, and any other filtering criteria to make sure you see relevant and organized information in one place. Check out this post about Custom Dashboard Widgets for a step by step guide. Happy to hear what you think of this!

Kristine Horn

I ran into the same sort of problem recently. The best I came up with was using Google drive "attachments" since they actually preview from within Wrike and are editable in any browser. Maybe in your case, a workaround for now would be to store all meeting notes in a GDrive Folder, and simply attach the entire GDrive folder to a Wrike Folder? That would at least mean no "tasks that aren't really tasks" show up anywhere.

Another option would be to use Trello for basic notes and reference and keep Wrike for tasks only. That's what we're doing, and I only had to go to GDrive when I had to make a document that had more complex formatting than Trello would allow. Trello really shines for keeping reference notes, especially since they are searchable AND organizable.

I still 1+'d this suggestion because I feel like this is a big opportunity for improvement for Wrike. I see the solution as simply having "Note" items that aren't "Task" items.

Permanently deleted user

Kristine, thank you for taking the time to provide those potential workarounds! I think those are good approaches for the meantime, and I personally especially like using Google Drive, since that's a tool I actively use daily. It's great hearing your feedback about this, I really appreciate it and wanted to thank you for keeping this conversation going here.

Nanette Giles

I am using folders as the space for keeping meeting notes. I then create tasks from the folders for actionable items from the meeting. I would create a folder for each customer, and write and date notes on the folder.

Permanently deleted user

Nanette, thanks for sharing how you approach this!

Alina Lushnikova

Hi everyone! We have started a discussion about real time collaboration in Wrike - our Product manager Artem is eager to know more about your experience in Wrike. I believe you might be interested in sharing: please go for it! The post lives here and contains a link to a survey for those who wish to share more detailed feedback, we will be happy to hear from you!

Kate Gerber

I know this suggestion is over a year old, but I would like to add that our team who has been using Wrike for just over a month now, would very much like to see a general notes section that wasn't tied to a task. Something more like a strategy area where you can add notes but they don't need to go through the same status/date process a task does. We found a similar feature in another platform that we evaluated before we decided on Wrike and that was one of the few things we were sad to see Wrike didn't offer.

Mike Boysen

I like the ideas here

/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002775289/comments/115000722685

But, I agree that allowing folders (or a different type of folder) to contain Notes or document links rather than tasks would be powerful.

Something else to consider: I believe Trello allows you, for example, to point to a Google folder, which is then elaborated inside a card. Also, full presentation of a Google Doc without going out to a browser might be helpful in some instances

Pedro Sanchez

I think beesy is more powerfull

Permanently deleted user

Hi all, the Product team is looking at the ideas shared here for future enhancements in terms of allowing a way to save links within a 'Folder' style within your Workspace.

I'll drop back here with updates from the team as I have them, please continue to vote and comment use cases here. Thank you! 👍

Al Sape

I would like to see something like this as well. I commented in a similar post here:

/hc/en-us/community/posts/360029750573-Wiki-tool

I think if you guys put some deeper thought into this, you could come up with a range of solutions that could handle a lot of this need, my two cents:

- I like the idea of a task still being some sort of memo/shareable note, especially for meeting notes. By virtue of it being a task, it can more easily be assigned, for example to meeting attendees. You have the new google calendar integration, which makes it super easy to schedule these tasks, so if you wanted to keep that you'd have to add this to a new "notes" module, which I assume would involve even more Wrike Product Team work. Also, if you simply added the ability to "like," or possibly "mark as read" a task, you could see who's seen it. Perhaps setting up a special type of task that could be set to be a "note" type? You guys don't have task types yet, but I feel that's an inevitable feature you'll add down the road as it's needed, and this would be a great type of task.

- Some beefed up ability to write notes within Spaces and Projects, referencing tasks and other projects/folders/spaces. Some tools such as Asana and Teamwork Projects allow much more messaging around projects. My suggestion to you guys would to have a sort of "announcement" ability within a space or project. This would be more than just a comments area, but a place to post a subject, and comment, with links to the tasks for reference. For example, if I have a Space for company goals, and as a manager I want to announce two new goals we're adding in Q2. I would "announce" in the Space, via a message that would have a subject and be viewable say alongside other tasks in the list view. The subject I propose is the task title, the actual message the task description. It would be essential to have the ability to have reciprocal linking though, as the two new goals, which would be folders or projects, should show some traceability back to this announcement since they were effectively "born" with the announcement. I think the reciprocal link should be more than just a pasted hyperlink in the task description, something more permanent in the task itself, similar to how Jira refers back to Confluence:

This is very powerful when the reference back to the note is embedded in the task view uniquely, provides great context when viewing.

I will leave it with you guys to continue to work through development of what would be a very helpful feature in Wrike. Glad to expand more if this was too long-winded and stream-of-consciousness!

Kate Shaw

Some great ideas here; I'm strugglng too with Wrike's limitations. Everything is too heavily dependent on creating tasks.

Hanna Zepeda

I agree there should be some way to take notes that aren't a part of a task. this would be beneficial for the company as a whole to provide a place to keep 'process docs'.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thank you for bumping this thread @Hanna Zepeda! Could you share how you'd envision a solution for this if it's not a task?

Grace Gonzalez

I'll preface this by saying that our team is new to Wrike, but we've found some solutions for notes that we really like. We found this option to be easily scalable, our team is about 30 people, but our client base is roughly 500 people all who have collaborator access to Wrike.

1. We created a workflow specifically for Documentation, all the types of notes we take are placed into the Deferred status, to keep the notes from showing up as active. We developed task types for inventory, brainstorms, meeting notes and a couple of other proprietary items, but you get the picture.

2. we have personal and public version of dashboards that sort by status and whatever else we want. (for example, I only save my own meeting notes into my personal dashboard, but we have a few group versions for anyone to refer back to regarding brainstorm conversations or shared research & development.

3. You can also filter your tasks based on these statuses, so if you have multiple meeting notes you'd like to see for an ongoing project, they're essentially hidden from your actionable tasks unless you filter to see them specifically.

I hope this is helpful!

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Wow @Grace Gonzalez, thank you so much for sharing your tips and best practices, they are so helpful!! And welcome to the Community 🤗

Brittany Papiro

This thread started in 2017 & I'm sad to see it still isn't resolved. 😔 This notes option would be a great function to have! I also am running into the "print" option where I think we should be able to select options of what we want to print exactly, aka I don't want "Brittany changed this or that" to be printed out, I just want to print the important information that I actually need.

Cansu Yetisgin

Hi @Brittany Papiro, thank you for taking the time to share your feedback and use case here. I'm passing it on to our team.

Lisa Genovese

I agree with Brittany that it's tough this still isn't solved...we've been with Wrike for over 5 years and are still struggling with this issue today...All of the workarounds suggested here are great...but are still "work arounds" and cause a lot of extra work for something that should be super simple...

Juan Muttoni

Hi @Lisa Genovese, welcome to the Community! In case you are referring to virtual meetings and if you happen to use Zoom, Wrike has developed an integration with this platform that allows you to:

Access tasks in Wrike and make changes during a Zoom meeting.
Take notes during Zoom meetings right in the Wrike task.
Add links to Zoom meetings to tasks in Wrike.
Create tasks in Wrike while in a Zoom meeting.
Attach a recording of your Zoom meeting (and chat transcript) right to the task in one click.

In case you don't wish to input such notes in a task (which would definitely be the best practice in these cases), you could either add them into the project's description field using, for instance, a bulleted list. Another option could be to use 'Text' type Custom field.

On a different note, we'd like to invite you to check our forum for new members of the Community where you can find a Quick Start Guide among many other resources to make the most out of your experience here 🙂

Looking forward to seeing more comments and posts from you in the future!