This works well for daily journaling too.
How to take meeting notes
81–90 of 130 posts
Re: How to take meeting notes
#82The 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…
I think there is a big difference between a meeting with one other person - as the author describes - and a corporate meeting of 3 project managers, 2 business analysts, an enterprise architect and 3 engineers who didn't think to reject the meeting they absolutely didn't need to be at. Meeting 1:1 you range all over, I often have meetings with people that go from work, to our kids, to the weekend, to work, back to th…
> But a year later when I remember it was that person's eldest's birthday I've made a solid connection.
Everyone is different, and I applaud you for the effort involved, but I have to confess:
This sort of thing mostly creeps me out. There's no way you remembered it organically, which means that you spent the conversation with me trying to identify items of personal interest that you could record and replay for some kind of social benefit/bonding.
My advice, and this might be what you do already, is to make sure a) the _thing_ is important enough to remember on its own, and b) your "memory" is vague enough that I don't think you're CRMing me.
E.g.:
BAD: Hey it's your wife's birthday on Thursday isn't it? Wish her a happy 34th from us!
OK: Hey your wife has an autumn birthday, doesn't she? I remember we talked about it last year around this time. Wish her a happy one!
GOOD: Oh that's right, we talked about that last year. My wife has an autumn birthday too. Wish her a happy one!
Re: How to take meeting notes
#83Lawyer here — self-cite (2010): "Note-taking in meetings and phone calls: Three easy habits your lawyer will love you for." [0]
Contemporaneous meeting notes are invaluable in legal disputes because they help the lawyers reconstruct a timeline of what happened. Plus, contemporaneous meeting notes tend to be believed more than hindsight witness testimony, which can have credibility problems — as in, people sometimes "forget," or hedge, or flat-out lie.
But: Meeting notes can also be misconstrued — sometimes intentionally (e.g., by opposing counsel).
[0] https://www.oncontracts.com/note-taking-in-meetings-and-phon...
Re: How to take meeting notes
#84Earlier 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…
imperious -> impetus
Re: How to take meeting notes
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
tangent / "rant" about date formats: they have an actual standard^1 that is chrono-sortable:
YYYY-MM-DD
it's only ambiguous to the degree that people adopt other "conflicting" conventions.
I wish v much for its adoption. It was established over 30 years ago.
1. ISO-8601 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
Re: How to take meeting notes
#86Strongly disagree with not taking any notes during the meeting. I've learned that by jotting down brief comments about the important action points during a meeting, you keep the meeting centered on action points as opposed to a million other things that don't improve your productivity.
It's a different world when you do that - meetings actually have a point if everyone knows your goal is to figure out how to act on the information.
You can then send a brief writeup of your notes and any additional information. Putting it in writing prevents misunderstandings and causes other to do what they said they'd do.
Re: How to take meeting notes
#87A note to the author: the phrase "first tense" should be "first person". Overall, this seems to be a very laborious process for something not that useful. I'm glad you and the people you've given notes to seem to enjoy it though.
Thanks for the tip, fixed.
Re: How to take meeting notes
#88Please assume good intent with this comment.
I had a bit of difficulty reading this because I was side-tracked by this sentence structure, which appears a few times throughout...
"Here’s how my paper notes look like".
I see this quite often and I'm having trouble figuring out what to search for to explain it and check if it's correct, and foreign to me, or if it's incorrect. I suspect it's incorrect and that it should either be, "Here's how my paper notes look" or "Here's what my paper notes look like".
Can anyone enlighten me on why I see this structure a lot?
Re: How to take meeting notes
#89Please assume good intent with this comment. I had a bit of difficulty reading this because I was side-tracked by this sentence structure, which appears a few times throughout... "Here’s how my paper notes look like". I see this quite often and I'm having trouble figuring out what to search for to explain it and check if it's correct, and foreign to me, or if it's incorrect. I suspect it's incorrect and that it shoul…
I bet you see this in non-native speakers' writing. Non-native speakers tend to subconsciously translate things from their native language to English (I'm one, and I find myself doing this now and then), and native speakers tend to notice the nonstandard usage more than non-native speakers.
Re: How to take meeting notes
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 obje…
> Overall, you basically do X for yourself and have more control over your work time.
The company has control of my work time by definition -- they pay me for my time. How it chooses to use the time I give them is the company's prerogative, not mine. I really don't care one way or another if it's cool with me sifting through Instagram for an hour while someone talks about a bunch of nonsense.