Unstructured notes are the default, and they fail predictably. They are written for the person who wrote them, in shorthand that decays, and they live wherever that mentor happens to keep things. Six months later they are unsearchable by anyone, including their author.
Structure is what makes a record usable by a second reader — the mentee, a sponsoring organisation, or the mentor's own future self. When every session produces the same fields, a year of sessions becomes something you can read in sequence instead of a folder you have to reconstruct.
The test is simple: can someone who was not in the session tell what was decided and what happens next? If the answer needs the mentor present to interpret it, that is notes, not a record.
Mentor10
Every Mentor10 session closes with the same structure — agenda, decisions, action items, next steps — shared with the mentee as it is written. Records are encrypted in transit and at rest, scoped to the people in the engagement, and exportable in full.