My approach to taking notes in meetings | Hacker News Reader

My approach to taking notes in meetings

blog.witful.com

152 pointstylertreat65 comments

I think every brain might be wired differently and a different approach might work better for some people.

But if I'm trying to make notes in a meeting, I can't listen to a speaker argue some nuanced point in a meeting while furiously trying to jot things down.

An approach that works for me is to have the meeting and try and pay undivided attention to it, then have 5-10 uninterrupted minutes at the end while everything is in short term memory to summarize it. If somehow I don't remember a point, it's usually not important enough to write down.

I'd say if 2 people in a meeting take that approach and and consolidate their notes at the end, you're going to get a complete picture of what just happened.

I think there's a bit more to it than this: note taking is more than just writing stuff down, its engaged with the process of having a well run meeting.

First, figure out the goal of your meeting: is it to share information (a standup, all-hands, etc.), come to a technical decision/consensus, something else? I'll focus on the second.

Your goal is to come to a decision, or resolve an open question. You have a stakeholder presumably, as well as some people with insight/opinions. You should define a few roles: meeting runner, note taker, and stakeholder. These can often be the same person, but are also often different people. The meeting runner does just that, they manage time, ensure people have a chance to speak, and generally referee and make sure things get done. The note taker takes notes, not an exact transcription, but detailed, attributed to speakers, etc. The stakeholder is somewhat responsible for the outcome, makes sure that they are happy with the result and manages AIs.

Note that these roles can't belong to any of the people who are presenting/arguing/disagreeing. Also, in practice, they can't belong to the least senior people in the room. Those people are probably going to be more actively involved in the meeting, while the people refereeing can sit back, ask questions and guide the discussion, with ample time to digest and take notes.

As someone who has at various points been both the active participant and the various stakeholder/notetaker/ref, it's a bad time if you have to do both. Notetaking takes up too much mental energy. I can't actively answer questions while taking notes. I can often ask them, if something isn't clear while I'm taking notes, it's sometimes extra obvious, so I can chime in with a question or a brief clarification, but anything more than that and you're likely to miss something.

This also, with the timekeeping, means that if the notetaker misses something, you already have the broad structure of the meeting written down, so others can chime in with anything forgotten, or add other follow-ups and action items. Then, you can email the whole summary out, and anyone who missed the meeting can see what was discussed, how the decision was reached, and follow-ups, and that's useful in case not all experts were able to be in the room, or as a reference for the future.

One thing to consider is that taking notes in a meeting is not about recording all information that is communicated. The key is to summarize the high-level point ("we cannot take approach X"), who stated it ("according to Bob"), and why ("because X will slow down Y"). This gives you sufficient info to reconstruct the main message and to know who to ask for more detail if needed.

I tell myself that, but in truth the main value in taking notes is it forces me to pay attention. When I'm not daydreaming about how I would make the last point in a different way (thus missing the current one), or thinking about whatever project I'm doing at home I get a lot more out of the talk.

I sometimes pretend I'm translating to Spanish (I don't know near enough Spanish to do this, but in my mind it is okay to make the English words with a Spanish ending and not worry if anyone else would understand). this doesn't work as well, but it still keeps my mind on listening and so I get more out of it.

Muy cleverito

When the CEO asks what you think about it, just go

  Chico, this no bueno!

I take a similair approach. Write down the important points and who stated them. Often times I will simply lead with the Bob: and not write "according to"

This is what I feel - I've done aggressive note taking, and then realized after a period of like 5 minutes I cannot recall a thing that was actually said or discussed.

...which, if the notes are the goal - why have the meeting? If they're not, then they're not needed.

In practice, I have fairly good recall, but there's also the basic element that I'm really struggling to recall any meetings I've ever had where anything useful actually got discussed (that couldn't have been an email). Maybe last week when I got my manager to explain some wider context of a project in a 1 on 1, but frankly, my current team has issues that none of the stakeholders have produced any briefing or priming documents (way more organizations should look at how the military structures briefings and provides operational context - they do a better job then the rest of us).

Yes! I agree!

My way to avoid that is: - avoid taking notes until a topic is exhausted - be the "obnoxious guy" that always says: "so, recapping blah blah blah". - If everyone agrees to my recap I write that down.

I often have (virtual) meetings with clients, and there may be 3-5 people of their team on the call, and I might have a colleague also there.

To make sure meetings aren't a waste of time, each of our clients has a Gitlab space on our self-hosted Gitlab, and while screen-sharing, I open their Board, which is in a sense the meeting agenda.

Then I open each issue, and I take notes while they are talking. If the discussion is too quick, I stop folks and tell them "one second, we should write this down, it's important but I'll forget". And before moving to the next topic, I ask every-one to validate.

Towards the end of the meeting (usually 30-45 mins), we then go back to the board, and re-prioritize if needed.

In parallel, I have a paper todo list, where I write down the issue numbers that I really need to prioritize, or other notes that the client should not see.

Obviously this does not work for all types of meetings, but we also do this for our internal company meetings and it's fairly efficient. In the past I would only use paper, but I ended up with lots of paper that I lost track of.

Love this approach to using GitLab to incorporate intentional documentation in sync meetings. I work at GitLab, and we use the platform to collaborate, but I've not used it as described here. We'll have to give it a try!

I've used this method since the early 1990s:

1) Use no tech.

2) Cornell-inspired note-taking paper with topics in the left margin and speaker names/notes/sub-topics in the main body. There's room for mind maps if you wish.

3) Actions go in the bottom field so they are easy to find later and mark off when done. If you need to reference something in the body notes for follow-up or action (because you don't have time to write something at the bottom of the page), put an A in a circle next to the relevant sentence.

4) Meeting notes are stapled together and filed in chronological order in a ring binder, divided by working group/meeting name or topic. You can then remove a bunch of notes from previous meetings to take into the current one for reference.

Here's a Word doc of my blank Cornell-type paper:

https://github.com/linker3000/Cornell

This approach is brilliant. Thank you for sharing.

> The way I would capture an action item during a meeting would be to underline (if handwritten) or bold (if typed) the part in the note and commit it to memory. Important things would always get remembered by the very nature of being important, but the slightly-less-important-but-still-valuable items would often slip my mind.

> This was the difference between being good and great at my job. It’s the stuff that, when missed, no one really notices, but when you’re on top of it, people think you’re superhuman.

Before starting work at a large company, I would have scoffed at the idea that "remembering little stuff" could ever be "superhuman."

Now? I'm right there with the author. The people I work with who consistently come to meetings with updates like "oh, and I took care of <small-but-important thing>" are my heroes.

I do something similar to the hybrid approach.

Instead of simply noting concerns, I ask if there is an actionable item, then note the action.

> CL: I don’t think Azure AD is the right choice for end user auth

would become

> CL raised concern about Azure AD option, @RF to revisit specific concerns with stakeholders by EOD tomorrow.

(the action would be highlighted for followup task assignment as appropriate).

Note: this approach is more appropriate for small-runway implementation projects with decision makers (or empowered individuals) attending, where decisions need to be made quickly or escalated.

In my opinion note taking should be a collaborative effort. All members of the meeting sharing a notepad together, and ideally even the meeting agenda is populated with headings before the meeting starts, allowing everyone to add notes below each heading (and keep it moving along and on task)

After approaching meetings this way I rarely need for my own personal notes. Just a personal reminder/todo list.

Shared notes lead to a shared understanding, and a shared set of actions. It's really quite helpful, especially in remote settings.

Very good point. Shared screen note-taking over Zoom/conf while discussing the meeting subject also leads to better meeting engagement.

At that point the meeting leader simply facilitates and people assign themselves tasks as the agenda is discussed and notes are taken/shared.

If those notes also happen to be some collaborative app (e.g. Google sheets) that allows attendees/team members to view/filter their own data it's even better.

The country where I’m from, the de facto corporate culture trains the junior employees to furiously scribble down notes as a manager/executive is speaking, as a formality and sign of respect. How much these notes are legible and useful will vary widely, I’ve seen some laughable ones, but it is a positive social tool to enforce the act of listening.

It's funny but I find when trying to scribble everything said down I'm not actively listening and comprehending anything that's being said just trying to copy words down.

I've found listening and jotting down short concise notes every now and than about something important is the best.

Is it really listening though? Of the three tested, verbatim was the worst in this test: https://www.iiste.org/Journals/index.php/JEP/article/viewFil...

There are others you can look up. Verbatim note taking means you are hearing the words but spending your time focusing on copying them rather than distilling/understanding them or putting them in context. Letting your brain process the information is more effective than trying to memorize the information.

listening != hearing + transcribing

I worked at one of these companies, as one of the scribblers, and it felt bizarre. Multiple people sitting in the meeting, furiously writing down every word spoken by the Great Senior Manager. It felt like I was one of those North Korean guys you see in those pictures, following Dear Leader around writing down all his words. The rationale we were all given was that it is very important to capture every word, because the execs remember what they said and asked for. If you forget to implement something that they mentioned very briefly or off-hand, they'll remember it and there will be trouble...

Reminds me of the story that engineers would attend Steve Jobs public presentations (during his first stint at Apple) to find out what they needed to work on, because occasionally he would "announce" something that heretofore had existed only in his head.

That's basically what I do in my lectures at uni. The notes are totally worthless after the lecture, but it does keep me engaged and off hackernews during class.

Reminds of " kim jong il looking at things" pictures where whole bunch of minions are jotting down his "on the spot guidance". They even have placards marking the places where such guidance was received and at what date.

Here's my shorthand. Google docs. Nested by topic, use ldaps, use "AI (action item)" to assign tasks.

  ldap1: This thing

    * ldap2: No that thing

    * ldap3: Because of this reason

    * AI(ldap1): Fix that thing

  ldap3: What about X?

    * ldap1: I think X is at risk

    * ldap2: We have an alternative from [this vendor](link)

    ...

    * AI(unassigned): Investigate vendor alternative to fix X

It's quick and easy to edit/share.

Google Docs creates TODOs automatically around "AI(ldap)" and correctly attributes them.

If you're in a multi-stakeholder meeting, you can present the notes and even have multiple people backfilling with links, screenshots, etc.

What does “ldap” mean in this context?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Directory_Access_P...

In the context I used it, ldap = username

Essentially all employees have a unique account that is used for email, unix sysadmin, etc., and this is accomplished via LDAP. You can sync permissions, auth, and more between various systems if they all speak the same language.

To use our hacker news usernames, yours would be "pdmccormick" and mine would be "echelon". Companies may choose to make these based on personal names, but it's not required.

Oh, you mean

usernames

GECOS

handles

I've never referred to names as ldaps and I would find it horribly confusing to do so...

I've only ever heard the term ldap from Googlers, to mean, "username".

It's a product of my environment. Everyone here uses "ldap" to mean "user", and it's infectious.

It's the first time I see usernames referred to as "ldaps". Learning stuff like this is why Hacker News is my favorite HTTP :o)

The conversation between MT, SW, and whoever else it was in the beginning of this article is the most useless business jargon I’ve ever heard. Why would you ever take notes like that? When our marketing team starts using words like velocity and alignment, we just start rolling our eyes at each other and I know they are going to ask for money.

The audience for these notes is the person who took them. They were in the meeting, you weren't, so there's a ton of context that you don't see, but will be triggered for the notetaker when they refer back to their notes.

I cannot multitask. At all. Listening and writing are two different tasks and I cannot do both at the same time. If you ever see me writing in a meeting you can know 100% that I am not able to listen to anything being said while I am writing. I am amazed by people who seemingly can both write and listen at the same time.

I don't understand. Do you have to look at the keyboard to type?

Notes feel as natural to me as talking.

No. But talking and typing are two different tasks. I can’t multitask. That includes typing and talking, typing and listening, etc.

What about talking to a person about the previous topic while listening to another person talk about the current?

I'm exactly the same

I either need to concentrate on the discussions or I concentrate on writing notes. If I try to do both at the same time I fail at both - badly.

I either record the meetings, ask a collegue to help take high level notes - then immediatly after the meeting put more detail in them from memory - then circulate (asap) the actions for feedback/ comments etc..

failing that, I will stop the meeting to write stuff down - ideally sharing the whiteboard, and this process showing everyone the degree of my (seriously) bad spelling, bad grammar and the amazing ability to completely miss multiple words out (or reverse the word order)

I am looking at this witful product UI and I wonder what stops MS to make interfaces like this in office products. Their UX is so awful in most of products. They have huge customer base, data and products to create great experience. Then, why?

I work on Witful. We spend a lot of time and effort keeping the UI clean and refined; to the point that we have accidentally over-simplified in a few key spots. The result is that we've got a ton of hidden functionality. Things like collated notes by domain or capturing "questions" (simply add `??` to a sentence to mark it as a question) are tricky to find. I think MS has just optimized for making everything "obvious" by adding a button for everything to their menu bars.

IMO it's generally more of a tooling problem than a methodology problem... like trying to build a skyscraper without power tools.

The main challenge with taking notes during meetings is that the tools use were designed for drafting in a non-linear environment. But notes in meetings are directly related to the content of what is being said at a specific moment in time, and the text-only notes usually fail to capture the full essence compared to watching that part of the video.

When building my last start-up, an online school on Zoom, we recorded every lecture so our students could go back and review the content during the working sessions. But they found it hard to correlate their Google Doc notes with the moment in the recording they wanted to go back and watch. But since we pulled over the Zoom chat log with timestamps back to moments in the recording, they started taking notes there so they could keep track of the part they knew they wanted to watch later or reference.

Long story short, when the online school got acquired I started my current start-up https://grain.co to turn that insight into software anyone could use to better capture and share knowledge during any kind of meeting.

Meetings: The activity of people hearing themselves talk. I think I stumbled here or in lobsters with this site: https://www.justingarrison.com/blog/2021-03-15-the-document-... Very apropos to the effectiveness of meetings and of course ,note taking towards creating long term value.

You've been looking for https://mindup.co/. I met Jonathan, their CEO a couple weeks back... he's one of the most down to earth founders I've ever met... he help create #yesphx... and a couple other startups. I'm requiring our entire company to start using his product this next quarter.

For me, I really like Zoom recording paired with the automatic transcripts. The transcripts help me to find the section of the video I need to review. I wish there was a feature to tie your typed notes into the video timecodes so by clicking on a note I had made, I could jump to the point in the meeting where I had made the note.

Great idea. I would use this but we can't record all zoom calls. Furthermore sometimes we are required to use other conf tools.

Descript does this well. It transcribes a video file and you can click around in the notes window and it jumps to that position in the video. Very handy tool/service. Free for the first fews hours per month(10 maybe), then paid.

I would want something that lets me take notes on the meeting live, then sync them up with the video and transcript after the fact.

Avoma.com does this exact workflow (Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder).

It has collaborative note-editor like Google. So during the meeting, you and your colleagues can take notes in the same document, or you can also take private notes.

All manual typed notes are linked to meeting recording and transcript to refer back the context later on.

On top of that, Avoma's AI will also extract some additional notes - like Action items, etc.

And if you or AI missed taking some notes, you can highlight the transcript text to add it to Notes.

It's the best blend of human intelligence working with artificial intelligence to create most structured notes, in the least amount of time.

And it works with all conferencing providers – Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting, etc. So you don't have to worry which conferencing supports recording or not. It's always taken care for you.

Hope this helps. Feel free to check it out at https://www.avoma.com.

Grain[0] is what you're looking for. (Disclaimer: I work at Grain.)

It lets you take notes during your meeting that are timestamped to a recording and transcript.

It also lets you share clips from your meeting both after and live during the meeting. It indexes your transcripts to make your meetings searchable later, and does a lot of other things to maximize the value you extract from meetings.

[0] https://grain.co

That's awesome, I'll check it out. Thanks!

Check out Notiv.com

Notiv provides this experience and post meeting will extract your action items and provides an index into the topics discussed.

Note, I work at Notiv.

Take a picture of the whiteboard at the end of a constructive discussion and email that to everyone.

The absolute worst thing is someone with a laptop struggling to type everything down, or everything they feel like transcribing, and not participating in anything.

<plug> ...or share that board with ShareTheBoard (and let everyone save it themselves) :) </plug>

I've found that in meetings, I mostly just need short quick notes. I don't need entire documents and structure. Instead, I jot down a few of the most important key ideas and action items. After the meeting, I add my action items into my todo list.

Working on bytebase.io - the fastest notepad for engineers. With Bytebase you can jump into a timestamped meeting note in one keystroke and bucketize individual items afterwards.

https://intercom.help/bytebase/en/articles/4587207-meeting-n...

I love taking meeting notes on pen/paper, and my colleagues, clients love them too. I used to write mostly text -- bullet points, keywords, figures, etc.

I started moving more towards sketches that depicts the idea, relationships, and the likes. I have suggested the books by Dan Roam[1] earlier and I'd still recommend them today.

Today, for instance, if I'm in a meeting for a product feature; by the end of the meeting, my notes are usually the starting point for the product team (designers, engineers) to get started.

1. https://www.danroam.com

Don't do as I did... I decided to use my iPad Mini with pencil to take notes at an important meeting, and the handwriting recognition worked really well. However, just to be sure/safe, I decided I'd also switch on the voice recorder app as well. Unfortunately, at the end of the meeting I had my notes, but also 30 minutes of pencil-tapping noises with barely-discernable voices in the background. I won't do that again...

Some of these techniques are impressive, but they don’t work for me. My notes take the form of drawings: flowers, aliens, bugs, geometric diagrams—whatever makes it look like I’m paying attention and prevents my forehead from violently impacting the table.

I imagine the act of writing a summary of the conversation rather than verbatim allows the brain to do some work to understand the gist of the meeting, which will help recall even without revisiting the notes.

dear Witful:

Dropping user tags and only having essentially 2 hardcoded types of auto-tags - timestamp + people ?

mmmmh. And Where to put the yellow/pink/.. sticky-notes?

Tagging/categorisation is a slow postprocessing - weekly, monthly, yearly. i keep reorganizing my mails from last 25 years. including pruning. Same for my pictures. Most stay as they were, but some change coordinates sometimes. As i may have changed.

yeah, one may say meetings and notes usualy don't last years.. except when they do because are actualy important. Should i invent DIY tags in title?

I routinely reference notes from several years ago in meetings. This was a decision we had a substantial amount of debate around internally. In the end we decided that a combination of person and timestamp tags combined with a robust search was a better approach for our users (people with many meetings each day). We've got a lot of work still to do before search is where we want it though. We know that decision isn't going to work for everyone though.

I take all my meeting notes on Agenda ( https://agenda.com/ ). It links the notes to the calendar events.

why are meetings special ? If you have a thought that you want to revisit later, but think may not remember to, put it on a list. If you read something on the internet you want to revisit later; bookmark it, or put it on a list. Do the same with meetings. If you hear something worth putting on a list, do it.

Skip the meeting saying you have another meeting to attend to,

later ask for "Action Items" "Meeting notes".

Record everything, voice to text every conversation.

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