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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

I work with many people who are against writing; they never write anything and they only want to do sync meetings (phone/in person); I am on the tech team usually which makes that even more painful as 'talking through tech' is a horrible thing. Nothing sticks as everyone needs time to think about things.

Inevitably, after a while, you get people losing track of things that were actually said, that were actually agreed on etc because there are no documents or that kind of tracking for that matter (there is stuff in Jira, but that's only following the hard tech points, not all the rest that was also discussed).

My business partner and me write a lot but we know nobody is going to read it; we do it anyway because I don't want to end up with a feeling of insanity in yet another phone call with 'but we did not discuss that!'.

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After a sync meeting, I find that it can be useful to note down your key takeaways in an email sent to the other party for confirmation. ("For posterity, this is what we just discussed: ...".)

One of the most useful habits ever.

That's called Minutes[1] and is super helpful to have.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minutes

Can't be, these are meetings at disruptive tech innovators! /s

Ah, I'm not a native speaker, but I'd always thought minutes are what the notes a meeting's scribe takes during the meeting. Thanks for the correction.

Unfortunately, it's not as common to have meeting scribes as it once was. If a project manager exists for the project, then (s)he takes them. Absent a project manager, people take notes individually, which is not ideal.

Writing minutes is useful but has its limitations.

A few years ago I worked with two technically brilliant but somewhat unpleasant guys.

After a while I realized it was a good idea to write down everything so I made sure I coukd always point to a mail or something.

Turned out even that had its limitations. At one point we discussed something and I ponted the older one of them to a mail where I had described it. His answer:

Sure, that's what you wrote but not what you meant.

I left not too many moons later.

Yep, seen it all... However for me personally the most effective is just doing my own notes and storing those with the meetings etc. If people want to frustrate things then they always can but this seems to be the safest way to protect yourself and your colleagues.

You've made a cardinal mistake of not sharing the minutes right after the meeting or, even better, as a last point of the meeting itself. Would that happen, you could reply: "Well, this is what you saw and accepted before."

I think I didn't write it clear enough:

He was well informed and acknowledged as much, he just still tried to twist it around to a situation where he was right.

> 'but we did not discuss that!'

I've been fighting the flip side of that coin in my team - people who make an idle comment on a phone call, and come back at you months down the line with, "This was already discussed and decided in earlier meetings."

It is possibly the most frustrating thing about my job these days, so I'm hoping as more people get used to working remotely, writing will start to take precedence.

Also known as time sink meetings.

For most companies, the process is not the product. Having immaculate meeting notes from sync meetings 3 years ago doesn't keep the lights on.

OP mentioned he's in a business owner role. He's probably talking to customers often, possibly scoping projects or features.

In these cases, having notes will prevent scope creep and will be necessary to have customers accept the work. Customers will forget what was discussed and what was agreed to. They will want to add that "one last thing" just when you're expecting to close the project.

Even in different roles (or internally), I think many would benefit from writing down meeting notes because it anchors the discussion and creates shared understanding. Voice only will cause many to forget specifics or move the goal.

I don't think OP is in favor of writing a book for every meeting. Having notes / documentation will make you more effective. It will also lower the frequency of you and the other party having different expectations. It's a good habit to have for these reasons and the many others outlined in this thread.

When I was a consultant/analyst, we had a few otherwise wonderful clients who were also masters of expanding the scope of projects if you let them. This, more than anything else, taught me the value of clearly documenting deliverables and milestones. That's not to say we couldn't make adjustments if needed but doing so needed to be done as a formal mutually agreed-to process.

Sorry no - I work on enterprise websites for a very big brand and the process is a key part of the product - liaising with European developers creative agencies in the UK / US and the brand and ourselves is a key part.

Unfortunately a lot of the big name consultancies and agencies are terrible at written communications and quite often farm out work to what appears to be interns with poor writing skills and very little knowledge of the web.

I got sent a scrappy unformatted PDF yesterday that if I had delivered that when I worked for British Telecom would have got my appraisal marked as needs improvement (the first step to a PIP)

Preventing the same discussion from taking place again and again and again does help keep the lights on though, and putting things in writing helps with that.

As does having the original reasoning for why things were done the way they were three years ago, when there's a new feature request and nobody is left of the original team.

> For most companies, the process is not the product.

Where do you think the product comes from? A bunch of people randomly doing whatever they want? The process absolutely impacts the product. Does SCM keep the lights on? It's the same thing, except for code.

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