Notes & Decisions

Not every piece of project knowledge belongs in a spec or a task. Architecture decisions, meeting outcomes, design rationale, and important context all need a home. Monday Morning’s notes system gives you a lightweight, searchable way to capture these alongside your work.

What notes are for

Notes fill the gap between structured work items (specs, tasks, issues) and the conversations that happen around them. Common uses:

• Architecture decisions — why you chose Postgres over SQLite, why you use JWTs instead of sessions
• Meeting notes — outcomes and action items from standups, planning sessions, retrospectives
• Context for future you — explanations of non-obvious design choices that would otherwise live only in someone’s memory
• Research findings — benchmark results, library comparisons, API limitations discovered during investigation

The key distinction: specs describe what to build, tasks track doing it, and notes capture the why and context around both.

The notes dashboard

All notes are indexed in .mm/notes/notes.md:

# Notes Dashboard

Last updated: 2026-05-12 10:00

## Notes
- **2026-05-12** - [Auth Architecture Decision](./auth-architecture-05-12-2026.md) - Architecture
- **2026-05-10** - [Sprint Planning Outcomes](./sprint-planning-05-10-2026.md) - Meeting
- **2026-05-08** - [Performance Baseline](./perf-baseline-05-08-2026.md) - Research

The dashboard is a chronological index with links to individual note files. Each entry includes the date, title, and category.

Individual note files

Each note lives in its own file under .mm/notes/:

---
title: Auth Architecture Decision
category: Architecture
created: 2026-05-12
---

# Auth Architecture Decision

**Category:** Architecture
**Created:** 2026-05-12

## Context
We need to add authentication to the app. Two approaches were considered.

## Decision
JWT tokens stored in HTTP-only cookies, with a 15-minute access token
and 7-day refresh token.

## Rationale
- Stateless auth reduces server complexity
- HTTP-only cookies prevent XSS token theft
- Short access tokens limit exposure window

## Consequences
- Need a token refresh endpoint
- Can't do real-time token revocation without a blocklist

You can structure the body however you like. The frontmatter (title, category, created) is what Monday Morning uses for indexing and display.

Creating notes

Use the /mm:note command in a Claude Code session:

/mm:note

The system prompts you for a title and category, then creates the note file and updates the dashboard. You can also create note files manually — just follow the naming convention ({slug}-{MM-DD-YYYY}.md) and add the entry to notes.md.

When to use notes vs. other entities

You want to capture…	Use
A decision and its rationale	Note
A bug or problem to fix	Issue
A feature to plan and build	Spec
A quick task or chore	Standalone task
Meeting outcomes and action items	Note (link to tasks/issues created from it)

Notes don’t have statuses or checkboxes — they’re reference material, not work items. If a note leads to actionable work, create a spec, task, or issue and link back to the note for context.

Searching and browsing notes

In the desktop app, notes appear in a chronological list. The dashboard file (notes.md) serves as both a human-readable index and the source of truth for the app’s notes view.

Categories help you filter notes by type. Use consistent category names across your project — Monday Morning doesn’t enforce a category list, so pick conventions that work for your team.

Related

• The .mm/ Data Model — where notes live in the .mm/ directory