Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to take meeting notes

barehands.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 130 posts

Re: How to take meeting notes

#51

Post by tchalla »

tootie wrote: post #44
ckastner wrote: post #7

A long time ago, my boss at the time taught me a valuable lesson: every meeting needs an official record(/log/minutes/whatever) documenting all noteworthy decisions (D), tasks (T, with deadline and responsible person), and information communicated (I), with that record being sent to all participants by end-of-day. The reasoning being simple: If anything of consequence was discussed in the meeting, then the official r…

I think detailed notes aren't as critical as just documenting decisions. Anything not written down is forgotten. This is why I prefer having critical conversations over slack. Every word is preserved in context.

> I think detailed notes aren't as critical as just documenting decisions.

Decisions and Action Items. A decision leads to an action items. The action items are usually topics for decisions next meeting OR a deliverable at the get go. In case of the former, the action item is to put the topic on the meeting agenda by the deadline. In case of the latter, the person is assigned right there in the meeting with a timeline for the deliverable.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#52

Post by mongol »

Rochus wrote: post #40

I have experienced so many meetings where nobody took notes, and the next day hardly anyone was able to say exactly what was discussed, that I don't think this is reasonable. In my opinion, meetings are not effective in most cases anyway, because people hardly ever prepare themselves. If people don't even write anything down, time is completely wasted. Since I am a consultant and do not want to waste my clients' time…

Can you take the real time notes also if you lead the meeting? I think that is often challenging, to request input, try to problem solve, making sure the meeting is constructive. Taking accurate notes requires myself often to be more passive than I can be if I am responsible for good progress. But depends on the meeting scope.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#53

Post by flreln »

nickjj wrote: post #15

It's crazy to think at how wildly different memory works. I once went on a 5 day business trip and about 2 days after the trip it was kind of effortless to recall pretty much all of the details of everything without taking notes. Enough to write a 7,000 word blog post and string together a story from beginning to end. I purposely left out many details for the sake of not wanting the post to be overly long. I also fin…

Have you tried the method of loci? I do a variation of it when I don't have writing means nearby to keep the idea in my head. In its essence, you visualize a familiar place (ie parent's home) and how you walk through it and drop what you want to remember somewhere. Works perfectly fine for me. I suspect that's because of grid cells and spatial cognition (more here: https://youtu.be/gmc4wEL2aPQ).

Re: How to take meeting notes

#54

Post by DanBC »

dreen wrote: post #14

Any meeting worth remembering is also worth recording, then you don't have to remember it cause you can just play it back. Seriously, why don't we just record meetings by default? We started doing this with story sizing and it's been great, obviously prompted by WFH, but I think we'll carry on doing it afterwards.

> why don't we just record meetings by default?

Chatham house rules make recordings a little bit tricky, but it's nothing that can't be overcome.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#55

Post by jabroni_salad »

doublesCs wrote: post #45
bluedino wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked somewhere that had an employee who took notes during every meeting, to what seemed like an annoying level. After every meeting, he emailed everyone who attended the meeting a copy of his notes. A couple jobs later, we were discussing changing where some images were hosted. It seemed very strange to have them in their current location, and the process that copied new images to that location was clunky. M…

> I once worked somewhere that had an employee who took notes during every meeting, to what seemed like an annoying level. After every meeting, he emailed everyone who attended the meeting a copy of his notes. Can you share what company was that? If not the company name, at least the industry?

Not the person you responded to, but when I worked at State Farm they had 'Organizational Support Specialists' who did this and other clerical odd jobs. Unfortunately they were pretty high turnover, it was rare to have one at the start of the project and still have the same person at the end.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#56

Post by kkielhofner »

While there are some useful thoughts and hacks presented in this post frankly if someone provided something resembling these examples post meeting I'd start by seriously questioning their priorities and time management skills.

Cynically speaking one may consider some of the prose and phrasing to be awkward to the point of unsettling - almost "uncanny valley".

My experience has been that meetings are almost always so information sparse that a "good enough" recall of relevant details is trivial. I have often been told (and tested as such) that I have a better than average memory but at certain levels of performance this is (essentially) expected.

Also be aware that significantly better than average recall of people, places, situations, etc can be very unsettling to others if there isn't a substantial accompaniment of charisma. There are gushing anecdotes all over with the likes of Bill Clinton, Tom Cruise, etc remembering the names of random strangers years after meeting them. Bear in mind, of course, these characters are personally likeable whether they remember your name or not!

Meanwhile (especially across genders) the reaction may not be quite so positive when it's "that awkward guy I had a meeting with once a few years ago. I think he might be obsessed with me"...

Overall this approach strikes me not only as unnecessary optimization but difficult to impossible to "pull off" for those it doesn't already come naturally to.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#57

Post by dragontamer »

tchalla wrote: post #49
dragontamer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roberts Rules indicates that the secretary (the one who records the meeting) is one of the most important roles. To the point: according to Roberts Rules, the #1 most important item in all meetings is finalizing the meeting notes from the previous meeting (ie: Everyone agrees that the stated meeting notes are correct). Every meeting, according to Roberts Rules, starts with an understanding that everyone at the new me…

Personally, I prefer to pre-empt this situation by an explicit agreement on Action Items (Who does What by When) during the meeting itself. I have a dedicated note taker who has been coached to ensure this takes place.

Ideally, no one makes mistakes and everything is well understood the first time around.

But in my experience: humans have errors (Ex: Notetaker writes down 1/2/2021 instead of 2/1/2021). Having a formal "last call" for record-changes is useful for catching these mistakes.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#58

Post by flreln »

corobo wrote: post #26

Is substack the new medium? I saw a link to it for the first time a couple weeks back (at least the first time I registered the name) and now it seems to be everywhere. Yes I'm aware of the phenomenon that makes you notice things more after you notice them once. Not that.

I'm not totally happy with Substack, but it's easy to use and takes no time to set up. Also, I think their core idea is that most posts can really be reduced to a dense email, and if we make it easy to send those, we'll do great.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#59

Post by flreln »

mirchiseth wrote: post #31

Best I have read on meetings including meeting notes is from Steven Sinofsky - goes into different types of meeting, meeting dysfunctions and finally peak meeting function https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/reaching-peak-meeting-...

Thanks for sharing!

Re: How to take meeting notes

#60

Post by jabroni_salad »

diego wrote: post #2

Never once in my life I thought "I wish I had taken notes when I met person X." I naturally remember something worth remembering to me, and never once I found out that there was something important that was said and I was worse off for not having written it down. Is it just me?

Must be nice. Personally, if I don't write it down I will probably forget about it. Perhaps I will even forget that there was something worth writing down...

I have been big on journaling for my entire life, though.

Post reply on HN