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My approach to taking notes in meetings

blog.witful.com

21–30 of 70 posts

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#21

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 everythi…

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.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#22

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.

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.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#24
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.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#25

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 everythi…

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.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#26

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.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#27
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.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#28
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...

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#29

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.

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…

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.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#30
post #13

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.
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