A Starter's Guide to Writing Effective Meeting Notes | Hacker News Reader

A Starter's Guide to Writing Effective Meeting Notes

meetnotes.co

145 pointsMeetnotes36 comments

I'm not really sure why this is on the front page of HN, but I'll add my thoughts because it is.

> To make your meetings successful, follow up on action items

This is it. Back when I was doing consulting, the only thing that mattered when I came out of the meeting was action items. Often, even if the agenda is X, something unexpected will have happened (often the reason why the meeting was called), and you'll actually spend the bulk of the time talking about Y. You should still have an agenda, but I found that clients appreciated most when I drilled at the action items. This also makes it really easy to wrap up meetings. When you get toward the end, you say something like: "We're starting to get short on time, here are the action items that I have from this meeting; x, y, z. Did I miss anything?"

Talking about stuff is pointless unless it leads to some action.

> Talking about stuff is pointless unless it leads to some action.

True, but why do people do it so much? I think it's because meetings are indulgent in several ways: usually you aren't working hard in a meeting, you interact with people you (usually) like, and the organizer gets to feel busy and command attention.

I used to work as an auditor (no idea why they let me) and I feel like we had way more meetings than necessary, and I sort of feel like it was because people were lonely. I could be totally wrong, but I remember concluding that after two years of frequent, pointless meetings.

That's why I like standing up during a meeting (when reasonable), because it mitigates forces that lead toward pointlessness.

Not all meetings are for deciding on action items. Sometimes you have to meet so that everyone is exposed to the same information at the same time. Sometimes, you meet to decide action items, even if everyone already knows what the action items are, so that people know that their input was factored into the action item.

And yes, sometimes you have meetings so you can waste time/spread the blame/look busy.

> so that everyone is exposed to the same information at the same time

Which is usually my least favorite meeting—the one that should have been an email.

In my experience people don't read bulk email. At least not closely. They might not pay attention in a meeting either, but it's more likely especially if you discourage use of electronic devices.

> I think it's because meetings are indulgent

Totally agree. If you fill your day with meetings, you can claim that you were working hard because you were busy. I, and others I have worked with have fallen into this trap. In a culture of overwork and burnout-humblebragging, filling time with meetings is a way to increase status because, as you say; you're commanding attention of those around you, creating flurries of activity, and "working hard".

I am unconvinced that it is because people feel lonely, but this may not be far off. In high stress environments, meetings can be a way to push the stress of whatever you're dealing with into a time box where you can offload it onto other people. This can be helpful in coping with stress.

The reason for meetings: even though you can email everyone in five minutes with a completely clear two paragraphs of what needs done ... they won't do it unless you sit there for half an hour telling them over a table.

This is infuriating and it's also true.

(my job: sysadmin.)

1) Never run a meeting without a clear agenda.

2) Never leave a meeting without agreed upon action items (task, owner, due date).

3) Set a timer 10-15 before the end of the meeting so that point 2 is achievable.

Anything else isn't a meeting - it's an informal discussion.

Have a Chairman or Woman probably ought to be #1

Follow up is also one of the most soul-crushing tasks. The skill to follow up without coming across as bossy, without micro-managing, consistently over months and years is super hard. If you grew and managed a team organically from scratch, the task becomes relatively easier. Perhaps the ability to be successful at following up directly depends on how much your team trusts you as their manager.

Agree. But much easier to know we should follow-up than to actually do it Especially for the more technical minded people (me included). Wish there was an AI that can automate it!

For me though, number of meetings you get pulled into without Agenda or need is the number one time killer!

We used to have this problem at work too. We solved it pretty easily (some people may find it a bit rude), but if the meeting was:

a) going nowhere

b) wasn't relevant to what you do

you would just say "Hey, not sure I'm needed here, I'm going to get back to work". This has worked really well to pare down the number of meetings we have as well as making them more focused.

We've also found that when you have a set length for a meeting you will fill all of that time up. Some of us have started doing a bit more of impromptu meetings that are short and to the point.

Obviously this isn't an easy thing to bring to any workplace, but I sure wish you could.

> For me though, number of meetings you get pulled into without Agenda or need is the number one time killer!

I solved that by just not going to those.

If someone invites me and has no agenda, I reply and ask "What is this about? What are we deciding?". That generally prompts an agenda, but in the rare cases where it doesn't, I will just reject the request and literally not show up. After I've done this once with someone, I generally don't get another invite from them without an agenda and clear purpose. (Maybe they just stopped inviting me, but that's fine with me too).

If the person sending the request is your superior, you have to be a bit more tactful, but it can still be done -- you may have to show up anyway, but really drive hard to get to decisions and/or action items (and get them written down and shared with attendees). If the meeting really does turn out to be useless (no decision, no action items) you can privately meet with your superior to discuss that later, and hopefully convince them it wasn't worth spending hundreds of dollars to do literally nothing.

There is an opposite danger, you skip too many meetings and then you get invited to one, and you go there, and you don't understand much what other people are talking about. And that is because you miss the common vocabulary, approaches, ideas which were discussed on previous meetings.

I send out the agenda in bullet points before the meeting, open the meeting by briefly going through the agenda, then wrap up by going over the answers to each point on the agenda to confirm, then send out an email with the same notes and actions to be taken as discussed in the meeting immediately after.

In Richard Branson's book he makes a big deal about keeping detailed notes of meetings, and how useful he's found the practice to be over his career

its really probably a very underrated habit, especially as a new, low on the totem pole person

it probably makes you a very useful gatekeeper of the information flow

the process of doing it probably reinforces the information flow into your brain for useful future brainstorming (it forces you to pay attention)

also it gives you the basis for which you can influence future decisions "On (so and so date), according to my notes we said we wanted to do X, so now we should do Y"

-----------

a suggestion,

run how people's ideas are presented in your notes to them directly, before you distributed them to the wider audience

"I'm trying to get the meeting notes together, this is how I have what you said about Y, do you mind looking at to make sure it accurately captures what you were saying?"

"That's not what I said" or, more likely, "That's not what I meant" is a good way to create dysfunction where none needs to exist

I am a big fan of meeting notes in a wiki, (nearly) immediately published for everyone to see.

"That's not what I said/meant": okay great, go edit the page and clarify.

NO edit wars for meeting minutes are a BAD thing any errors or omissions should be addressd in the next meeting

Yes, only the secretary (or official minute-taker) should be allowed to change the text of the minutes, and once "approved" the minutes should be read-only.

Corrections can be submitted to the secretary by email in advance as a convenience.

I've never had an edit war problem on meeting minutes.

I think that is because of his dyslexia and poor short term memory

And, as an excellent Twitter thread recently noted: take notes at the front of the room.

https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/846086667790311424

This is not solely valuable for avoiding stereotype traps, it's a useful career tip for anybody.

It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it [music note emoji]

Lawyers often seek to get copies of minutes of relevant meetings, phone calls, etc., for use in litigation. A few years ago I posted some note-taking tips that your lawyer will love you for: http://www.oncontracts.com/note-taking-in-meetings-and-phone... (self-cite, obviously).

My system for notes is very simple, and similar to what was outlined in this article.

Before the meeting:

Other than daily stand-ups, no meeting invite goes out without an agenda. We have a policy that anyone can freely decline a meeting without an agenda. (If I'm really in a rush, I'll limit the agenda to just a one-sentence purpose statement about why we are having the meeting.)

Meeting notes look like this:

# Meeting Date

Wednesday March 29th, 2017 @ 10 AM

# Attending

* Dave Dawson (Dave.Dawson@company.com)

* Sally Smith (Sally@Smith@company.com)

* Joe Jackson (Joe.Jackson@company.com)

# Invited

* Bob Billings (Bob.Billings@company.com)

# Meeting Notes

* (Copy and paste agenda here, then make minor edits over the course of the meeting to track updates / changes, and any action items people take on. I like bullets for readability.)

After the meeting:

I write a quick summary of the meeting notes and any action items, "Joe, Sally, and Dave spoke about XYZ. Joe will take care of a few additional action items, after speaking with Bob and The Client, and we will all regroup in a week. Bob was out sick and couldn't attend." This goes at the top so anyone with a short attention span can skim it.

Then I email everyone who was on the Attending / Invited list (or anyone mentioned in the meeting) with all the notes, and / or post it to the public meeting note storage location in Asana / Confluence / Whatever. Finally I create any followup meetings as needed. (If I'm feeling exceptionally anal, I'll create or update GitHub / Asana / Whatever tickets with the pertinent action items.)

Since this is content marketing for meetnotes.co (which looks like a pretty cool service) I feel like it's reasonable to give some constructive criticism to the team behind the product.

Remove "Beta" from your marketing site. Please.

People, especially early adopters, know that software is made by people. If something goes wrong or doesn't work, people are willing to forgive other people. The beta label can only hurt you at this point.

Great work getting to the front page of Hacker News :)

@wwalser You got us! I am surprised as well that we got to HN front page and the amazing discussion that ensued. While that blog took couple weeks to put together, I believe its testimony more to how everyone hates meetings and how they are run, rather than our ingenuity in writing the blog.

We believe meetings are world wide epidemic. There are lot many tools trying to make them just a tad bit better. The real ingenuity on our part would be if meetnotes.co ends up solving the pain in a major way! I believe we are on the cusp of change and it can just about be done with some AI, a bit of NLP and some great UX thrown in!

Would love to get feedback and hear opinion.

Looks nicely done, what little I can see without divulging my entire Google calendar to the service.

But I'm honestly having trouble seeing what this does that isn't just as easily handled by Google Docs, Word, or any other editor.

I am not sure if you got to try adding an action item. You can just type "@ams6110 Need to do something" and meetnotes records it as an action item which would then be tracked and followed up, the key being follow-up and status tracking.

The idea there is that while taking notes I don't want to look at the screen and click a button to add an action item, set its assignee and due date etc. I would rather participate more in the meeting and just keep typing (touch typist should get me), with the tool being smart enough to parse it as an action item. Its not as smart as it should be, but thats where we want to be.

Another small but neat feature is interactive widgets. I am not sure if you saw the how you can run an instant rating with all the participating. Its just one widget right now, but we are planning to add many more like poll, survey, mini-workflows, scrum templates etc.

Let me know if that did / didn't make sense. Happy to hear feedback!

PS: Before this, I myself was a heavy user for Google Docs for taking notes.

Taking the meeting minutes is one of those startlingly effective hacks to steer a project you've been landed with, without taking the blame for others' failures.

Always volunteer to take minutes, email them to all afterwards, keep them short - "under one page" was the rule in the paper days, these days I'd say "one desktop screen or two laptop screens". Shorter is better.

You control perception and you control ensuing actions. You (literally) write the narrative.

(Requirement: you at least need to know what your desired outcome is.)

Holy crap, it's like having cracked a secret code. Nobody in a corporation knows what the hell they're doing; look like someone knows even slightly and stuff actually gets done.

(Also: if you're not the white male in the room, it can seem to slot you in as lower status. But it's still a fabulously effective way to get everything done to your ideas. Jessica Price, who knows her stuff, recommends taking them standing at the front of the room, not off to one side: https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/846086667790311424 YMMV, try stuff.)

Good advice, particularly the point about not capturing conversations word for word. Much better to get the gist correct than strive to get everything exactly (and inevitably end up missing things).

I also like the "How Might We..." post-it strategy (outlined in http://www.thesprintbook.com/). That turns each point into an actionable question with a positive-spin.

Taking notes is also a form of Influence Capital. Having proof of what people said, when they said it, is extremely important for people like me with "100% Accountability, 0 Authority" roles. Being the only person taking notes is the ultimate CYA outside of an audio recording (not that any of this matters in the chain of command, but at least it feels good to be right at the end of the day).

This just showed up in my Pocket "trending" list: Become a Better Listener by Taking Notes, by a "global CEO coach," in the Harvard Business Review [0] (requires signing up for a free account, apparently).

EXCERPT: "Through my work with executive teams, I’ve developed a simple technique that can help anyone listen more effectively in meetings. I call it Margin Notes. You may already take notes during meetings, but unless you’re using them wisely to understand others and plan your response, you may still fall into the same trap of speaking before you think. Margin Notes allows you to think, process information, make connections between points of discussion, and ask effective questions instead of blurting out the first thing that comes to mind."

[0] https://hbr.org/2017/03/become-a-better-listener-by-taking-n...

One of my new years resolutions was to learn to type faster. To get some practice I started taking notes in all the meetings I attend. This wasn't common practice in my team before, but I've found it to be really useful. I've lost track of the number of times someone's said "didn't we talk about this in that meeting a couple of weeks back" and I've been able to point them at my notes.

I've found a really simple way of authoring and sharing notes is to write them in Org mode and then push them to a wiki on github. Github understands how to render Org markup nicely, so you get a nicely formatted wiki pretty much for free.

As an added benefit I can now touch type :)

I use the phrase "Moving the ball forward" and I apply it to all meetings. Even if there is an agenda, I ask this question. If this is a status meeting I often don't go. Before the meeting ends I ask: "How did we move the ball forward in this meeting?" And if the answer is we didn't, we stay seated.

This is great. If Meeting notes get written, the chance of follow-up it 40-50%. If not, it trends to 0. Meeting notes are the only good weapon against our failing memories, and decisions that get changed without everyone being present.

I use Evernote, and carry my laptop everywhere because otherwise it doesn't happen.

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