How to take meeting notes • Hacker News Board

Re: How to take meeting notes

#101

Post by Max_aaa » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 11:10 PM UTC

hesdeadjim wrote: post #4

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?

Memory capability and behavior is variable. I can remember and keep in mind vast swaths of code, but I am capable of forgetting someone’s name in seconds.

I literally have to keep a text file on my phone with peoples names. I have exceptional visual and spacial memory, but names just slip through like sand through a sieve.

With the text file, I just have to recall on roughly which line the name was and I am able to recall it. I have no idea why or how this works, but it does. I did try to keep a "Mental" list, but that just does not work, I need to type it in or write it on a piece of paper for it work.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#102

Post by abalaji » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 11:17 PM UTC

The piece that I think is most important here is the amount of time OP spends on this process post-meeting. It's a ratio of 4:1 in terms of meeting time to recall time. It's this ratio that I think prevents most people from being more deliberate about the time that they spend with other people.

I wonder if someone writing software could help with that process. Most note taking tools are very open ended, would love to see more "opinionated" tools in this space.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#103

Post by abalaji » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 11:18 PM UTC

quesera wrote: post #82

zwayhowder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's certainly one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that the above OP was just being thoughtful.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#104

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: How to take meeting notes

#105

Post by csharpminor » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

Some meeting advice that managers over the years have given to me:

- If you are leading a meeting, schedule (at least) as much time to prepare for the meeting as the duration of the meeting.

- Before each meeting, clearly articulate the POP: Purpose, Outcome, and Process.

- Designate a note taker and document all decisions / outcomes / tasks / follow-ups.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#106

Post by Ensorceled » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 12:19 AM UTC

> You can delight the people you meet with by sending a detailed note with everything you covered on a meeting (very few people do that)

Be careful with your approach with disseminating meeting notes, despite what this article claims, they are not always well received. I've been promoted, in part, for providing this kind of structure to meetings but have also found myself embroiled in a political battles with gas-lighting coworkers.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#107

Post by kenhwang » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 12:29 AM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #39

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 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…

If I'm calling a meeting, I'm sending out the agenda and meeting notes and expect the same of meetings I attend (and decline if there's no agenda sent beforehand).

Plus side is it really cuts down on pointless meetings since many times people just want to call meetings to avoid doing actual work, and with documentation responsibilities falling on the meeting caller, they have to do more work, not less.

Downside is the strong correlation between people who suck at meetings and people who suck at taking notes. Which can be pretty frustrating because you know who the pointless poorly run meeting people are, but you also can't rely on the notes if you skip.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#108

Post by quesera » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 1:17 AM UTC

abalaji wrote: post #103

quesera wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's certainly one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that the above OP was just being thoughtful.

Recording and replaying opportunities to appear thoughtful, is not thoughtful.

It's merely artifice for the purpose of appearing thoughtful, which I find creepy.

But as I note in my initial comment: everyone is different.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#109

Post by baud147258 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 1:53 AM UTC

tuatoru wrote: post #91

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. Exactly why notes should be taken and disseminated. Without going to the lengths tchalla describes, simply stating meeting duration and number of people in attendance, and listing decisions made and expectations raised for deliverables will over time reduce the frequency and duration of meetings and make them more focused and effective. Simply seeing repeated examples of…

> If you want to be a hard-ass, just multiply out the duration and number attending: "the meeting took 10.5 person-hours".

Then multiply by the average compensation to get the cost of the meeting

But keeping a note of the decision(s) taken is useful, especially in case of later disagreement.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#110

Post by moltar » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 1:53 AM UTC

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…

Check out Learning How to Learn course (free). They talk about how learning and memory works from first principles and also teach various memory techniques. There are ways a visual person can learn too.

On the other hand I find memorizing speeches isn’t a good method, because you’ll sounded unnatural. Better to memorize the key points and the sequence of them.