Keep notes when things get tough

This is something I learnt from a friend in the industry who had to deal with a client situation gone bad, and on a small scale, also something that experience has taught me many times.

Short version:
When things get tough, keep notes of what is going on, so when the sh** hits the fan, you can back up what you say.

Longer version:
While everything is humming along, you might be taking the occasional note - scribbling “mail report to Ted” on a piece of paper that is your impromptu ToDo-List for the afternoon, for example, or putting yourself a reminder in Outlook. When the project gets in crunch-mode (i.e., you are under stress, and everybody else is), though, many people stop keeping notes. And when in real trouble (e.g., the customer is angry because a deadline was missed, there was a misunderstanding, you are accused of having stolen their lunchbags), people stop taking notes altogether and fall back to reactive-mode.
This is a bad thing. The worse the situation get, the more accurate your notes need to be. I am not talking about prose here. This is not a hidden procrastinators’ heaven. I am talking about keeping a logbook, on paper preferably. Here’s why:

• Under stress, you might forget something you needed to remember. Keep it in a list. Mark it done when it is done. It gives you security, and it makes you reliable.
• When a colleague tells you something that might be important later, like “the customer always spells easy as ‘eaZZy’. They like it that way. Please stick to this in all documents” , note it down. Otherwise, it is forgotten after five minutes, and only gets back to you in the night when the final presentation needs to be sent to the client.
• Note done what you agreed on with your team members and the customer. For meetings, there are meeting minutes (hopefully!), but for the quick 30-second call to confirm a fact, there might not be. Write down who you talked to, when, and what was talked about / agreed upon. This is a life saver. It is a much better thing to say “Bob, I am sorry that you expected me to make the analysis until today, but in our call on wednesday afternoon last week we agreed that it would have no real added value and decided to not include it” than “Bob, are you sure this was still in scope? I am sure we talked about that and agreed not to do the analysis sometime in the past!”
• When you sense that big trouble is ahead - lets say, the customer has been irate and angry for a week and threatens to call the whole deal off, and you think that your Vice President might not be amused at all - you might want to go even further and note more details down, like the delivery of documents and who was on the client site when. Of course, this borders on paranoia… as I said, when big trouble is ahead. Especially when things get really tough and you go into litigation (this does happen, unfortunately), you better know what was said and done.

I know. You have your ToDo-List in Outlook. Or in a textfile. Still - Keep a little logbook. Treat yourself with one of those fabled Moleskines, if you want. Write. Things. Down - and the worse the project gets, the more you should jot down. It will save your precious behind sooner than later.