The short version: split horizontally, not vertically — call on top, notes below. Video is wide and short by nature; notes want width for readable lines; a left-right split serves neither. Share a single window rather than your screen, always. And learn Rectangle‘s Restore command, which puts the window you displaced for the meeting back exactly where it was.
Why horizontal beats vertical
The instinct is a left-right split, because that’s what window management usually means. For calls it’s the wrong axis.
Video is inherently wide and short. Squeeze a call into a vertical half and you get a small video with thick empty bands above and below it — you’ve spent half your screen to display something occupying a fraction of that space.
Notes have the opposite problem in the same arrangement. A narrow column produces short lines and constant wrapping, which is exactly the wrong shape for fast typing during a conversation you’re also trying to follow.
Split horizontally and both improve. The call takes the top third or half, wide and short, matching the video’s natural proportions with minimal waste. Notes take the rest, full width, with comfortable line lengths.
On a laptop this isn’t a refinement, it’s the difference between an arrangement that works and one you abandon after two meetings.
The three call types
Meetings differ in what they demand, and one layout for all of them is a compromise nobody needs to make.
Listening. An all-hands, a presentation, anything where you’re absorbing. Video small, in a corner. Notes get most of the screen. You barely look at the video and mostly need to hear it.
Conversation. A one-to-one, a small team discussion. Faces matter here — you’re reading expressions and timing your turns — so the video gets real space, roughly half the screen, and notes take the rest. This is the layout worth having as your default.
Presenting. You’re sharing. The shared window needs to be prominent enough that you can see what your audience sees, participant video shrinks to a corner, and your notes go somewhere you can read them but that isn’t being shared. Which is its own subject.
Two shortcuts cover the switch between listening and conversation layouts. Worth having both rather than picking one and living with it.
Share a window, not a screen
This is the single most consequential setting in this article and it isn’t really about window management.
Sharing your whole screen broadcasts everything: notification banners, message previews, browser tabs, whatever you open by accident. Everyone has a story about a message arriving mid-presentation. Most of these stories are mild embarrassment; some are not.
Window sharing shows one window and nothing else. Notifications don’t appear in it. Your other windows are invisible. You can have your notes, your chat, and your messy desktop open and none of it exists to the audience.
The secondary benefit is freedom of movement. With screen sharing you’re performing your entire desktop, so you can’t check anything without your audience watching you check it. With window sharing you can look at whatever you like — the shared window keeps showing what it shows.
One practical detail: pick and size the window before you start sharing. Some conferencing tools capture the window’s dimensions at share time, so resizing mid-share can produce a resolution change on the viewers’ end. Set it, then share.
Where your notes go while presenting
If you’re sharing a window and reading from notes, the notes must be somewhere that isn’t shared and that you can actually see.
With two displays this is trivial: shared window on one, notes on the other, no thought required.
On one screen it takes a moment’s arrangement. The shared window sits wherever it needs to be; notes go alongside it, visible to you and invisible to everyone else because window sharing doesn’t capture them. A small notes window in a corner is enough, since you’re glancing at bullet points rather than reading prose.
The failure mode to avoid is notes underneath the shared window, where checking them means bringing them forward — which is fine for the audience but breaks your own view of what you’re presenting. Side by side, not stacked.
Getting your work back afterward
The part everyone skips. A call ends and your screen is a call window and a notes window, with your actual work buried.
The direct tool is Restore, which returns a window to the size and position it had before you first snapped it. You shrank your editor to make room for the call; one shortcut and it’s back at exactly its prior dimensions, not an approximation you eyeball.
It’s per-window, so a full arrangement means a few presses. Which is still faster than dragging, and this is where cheap-to-rebuild layouts pay off — a standard arrangement you can reconstruct in four keystrokes makes the post-meeting reset a non-event.
Worth building the habit of doing it immediately rather than working around the call window for twenty minutes. The reset takes seconds; working in a broken layout costs more than that in small friction.
Back-to-back meetings
If your day is a wall of calls, the arrangement changes.
Stop rebuilding between meetings. Set the call-and-notes layout once in the morning and leave it — you’re not doing sustained work in the gaps anyway, and rebuilding your working layout for a twelve-minute break is pure overhead.
Give notes more room than you would for a single call. Across six meetings you’re accumulating a lot of text, and scrolling through a cramped window to find what you wrote two calls ago is its own small misery.
And consider putting the video on the laptop screen if you’re docked, with notes filling the external. On a meeting-heavy day the video is mostly ambient — you need to hear it and occasionally glance at it — while the notes are where you’re actually working. Sizing them accordingly matches how you’re really using the two.
The shortcut that supports this is throwing a window to the next display, which is one keystroke in the Rectangle app and considerably better than dragging a video window across a desk.
The minimum version
Two shortcuts and one setting: a top-half or top-third position for the call, a bottom position for notes, and window sharing instead of screen sharing.
That covers the large majority of calls for most people, takes no configuration beyond binding shortcuts you probably already have, and needs nothing beyond a free window manager for Mac. The rest of this article is refinement for people whose days are mostly meetings — which is a real population, but not everyone.
Frequently asked questions
Whole screen or a single window?
A single window, essentially always. Screen sharing exposes notifications, message previews, and anything that appears; window sharing shows only what you chose and keeps everything else private.
How do I take notes without the call covering them?
Split horizontally — call on top, notes below. Video is wide and short; notes want width for readable lines. A left-right split serves neither, especially on a laptop.
How do I get my layout back afterward?
Restore returns a window to its pre-snap size and position, which handles whatever you displaced for the call. For a full arrangement, a few position shortcuts beat any amount of dragging.