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How to take meeting notes

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Re: How to take meeting notes

#71

Post by tchalla »

dragontamer wrote: post #34
ckastner wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is exactly why you send the notes by end-of-day. People get the chance to object ASAP, and are otherwise bound to the record going forward.

Roberts Rules recognizes that if there's a conflict in two stakeholder's view of the notes, the only resolution is to call a new meeting. (Ex: Person A thought that 3-weeks was the agreed upon delivery date. Person B thought that "3 weeks after next Tuesday" was the agreed upon delivery date.) Who is correct? Person A or Person B? Maybe PersonC or PersonD have insight into the issue. Regardless: the solution is to ca…

> (Ex: Person A thought that 3-weeks was the agreed upon delivery date. Person B thought that "3 weeks after next Tuesday" was the agreed upon delivery date.)

You should surely call a meeting to clear up the conflict as soon as possible.

Another interesting angle would be, "What can we do to make the situation doesn't happen again?". One way would be to document delivery dates in the dd/mm/yyyy format. Therefore, the action item in the meeting note should be "X does Y by 13.10.2020".

This Action Item is put in real-time on the screen during the meeting itself. So, yes I agree with you that sooner is better. In my world, the sooner happens in the meeting. Therefore, I have dedicated note takers during meetings who are coached to run meetings. Most of these note takers do not even need to be individual contributors.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#72

Post by tchalla »

josefresco wrote: post #11

Me during a meeting: I don't need to write this down, I'll remember it. Me after meeting: Arg! I wish I had written that down! Me during meeting: I'm going to write this down even if it doesn't seem important. Me after meeting: Why do I have notes on only meaningless stuff!?! Clearly I have some work to do, but the advice to listen and then write notes after is good, but I would suggest doing so towards the end with…

A framework which has helped me to write meeting notes- .

Decisions and Action Items are the most important parts here. Action Items should be the form "Who does What by When". Agreement on the Action Items should be taken during the meeting itself.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#73

Post by tchalla »

dvt wrote: post #3

The premise here is that meetings are chock-full of valuable and dense information. This is not true. Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of time. There are also various linguistic theories that argue that actual information density (in spoken/written language) is significantly less than 95%. So the corollary here is that remembering 95% of a meeting is a waste of cognitive capacity. The better strategy would be to b…

> Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of time

Let's assume your premise is true. What can we do to change this situation? Here are a few things which have helped me

1. Define Key Objectives for a Meeting

2. Define Agenda

3. Agenda has 4 parts - Topic, Owner, Expected Outcome, Duration, Time

4. Owner - The owner of the part of the agenda is expected to own the topic and drive it

5. Owner needs to pre-define the Expected Outcome beforehand. Broadly, there could be three outcomes - Information, Discussion or Decision

6. Moderator should keep a strict check on Time. Sometimes, if there's a overshoot - the moderator should either ask for team agreement to continue the topic for a limited time (10 min - for example) until the Expected Outcome is reached. If not, stop the meeting and move on the the next item on the Agenda.

Yes, all this is a lot of work. But this fruitful work can reduce the total number of meetings to 5-10% of your total work time.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#74

Post by iandanforth »

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.

Can you say more about your dedicated note taker? Is this someone who personally attends meetings? Someone who gets a recording? Is this their full time position, or are they a EA?

Re: How to take meeting notes

#75

Post by jedberg »

The best note taking experience I ever had was at the very first Startup school. Someone had a collaborative text editor that worked on the local network, and word got around so we all installed it. It was basically a local version of Google Docs, where everyone could edit at once.

Basically, everyone wrote down what they thought was important, so you could see what other people thought were important and add to it. Also that way people could correct mistakes other people made.

There ended up being maybe five primary note takes, and then maybe 20 or so who were adding small tidbits and another 20 who were mostly just fixing small mistakes, out of a group of 500.

And at the end we ended up with an awesome summary of the entire day.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#76

Post by dvt »

tchalla wrote: post #73
dvt wrote: post #3

The premise here is that meetings are chock-full of valuable and dense information. This is not true. Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of time. There are also various linguistic theories that argue that actual information density (in spoken/written language) is significantly less than 95%. So the corollary here is that remembering 95% of a meeting is a waste of cognitive capacity. The better strategy would be to b…

> Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of time Let's assume your premise is true. What can we do to change this situation? Here are a few things which have helped me 1. Define Key Objectives for a Meeting 2. Define Agenda 3. Agenda has 4 parts - Topic, Owner, Expected Outcome, Duration, Time 4. Owner - The owner of the part of the agenda is expected to own the topic and drive it 5. Owner needs to pre-define the Expect…

> Yes, all this is a lot of work. But this fruitful work can reduce the total number of meetings to 5-10% of your total work time.

I totally agree, but I'm usually not in a position to change the culture around meetings, nor do I get paid enough to be motivated enough to do it. If I ran my own company, the story would, of course, be different.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#77

Post by iandanforth »

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…

As someone who has had to memorize dozens of scripts, both in plays and speeches I recommend brutal repetition. In addition I recommend making sentence by sentence Anki cards where the prompt is one line and the "answer" is the next.

But really if you haven't gone through a speech 50 times you're just getting started.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#78

Post by bluedino »

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?

Small manufacturing company. This guy was a controller/CFO

Re: How to take meeting notes

#79

Post by tchalla »

iandanforth wrote: post #74
tchalla wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you say more about your dedicated note taker? Is this someone who personally attends meetings? Someone who gets a recording? Is this their full time position, or are they a EA?

Sure! This person attends the meeting and has the full responsibility to document Decisions and Action Items (Who does What by When). The person is the moderator of the meeting but not an individual contributor. The person has the full right to ask "Who is the Action Item for? By When will you finish the Action Item? What is the Decision we took?". All meetings are driven towards decision making and action items, no matter how small.

The role and responsibility of this person is clearly communicated to the team before the project. The person is aggressively coached before the project. In one case, live examples of note taking were provided with the note taker as a reticent participant of the meeting.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#80

Post by tchalla »

dvt wrote: post #76
tchalla wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of time Let's assume your premise is true. What can we do to change this situation? Here are a few things which have helped me 1. Define Key Objectives for a Meeting 2. Define Agenda 3. Agenda has 4 parts - Topic, Owner, Expected Outcome, Duration, Time 4. Owner - The owner of the part of the agenda is expected to own the topic and drive it 5. Owner needs to pre-define the Expect…

> Yes, all this is a lot of work. But this fruitful work can reduce the total number of meetings to 5-10% of your total work time. I totally agree, but I'm usually not in a position to change the culture around meetings, nor do I get paid enough to be motivated enough to do it. If I ran my own company, the story would, of course, be different.

> I'm usually not in a position to change the culture around meetings, nor do I get paid enough to be motivated enough to do it.

I can totally understand you can not change culture around meetings in the entire organisation. I would like to offer two perspectives.

First, you could however change the micro-culture in most meetings which you are a participant. For example, "Hey! Thanks for the invite. What are the objectives for the meeting? It will help decide my participation for contribution". Second, if you are not paid enough, it is even the perfect reason todo so. It can buy back more time for yourself by reducing meetings! Overall, you basically do X for yourself and have more control over your work time. So, if you do not want to do it for the organisation - do it for yourself.

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