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My approach to taking notes in meetings

blog.witful.com

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Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#41

Post by svilen_dobrev »

dear Witful:

Dropping user tags and only having essentially 2 hardcoded types of auto-tags - timestamp + people ?

mmmmh. And Where to put the yellow/pink/.. sticky-notes?

Tagging/categorisation is a slow postprocessing - weekly, monthly, yearly. i keep reorganizing my mails from last 25 years. including pruning. Same for my pictures. Most stay as they were, but some change coordinates sometimes. As i may have changed.

yeah, one may say meetings and notes usualy don't last years.. except when they do because are actualy important. Should i invent DIY tags in title?

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#42

Post by irrational »

ultra_nick wrote: post #26
irrational wrote: post #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.

I don't understand. Do you have to look at the keyboard to type? Notes feel as natural to me as talking.

No. But talking and typing are two different tasks. I can’t multitask. That includes typing and talking, typing and listening, etc.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#44

Post by bluGill »

warkdarrior wrote: post #25
logicalmonster wrote: post #12

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.

I tell myself that, but in truth the main value in taking notes is it forces me to pay attention. When I'm not daydreaming about how I would make the last point in a different way (thus missing the current one), or thinking about whatever project I'm doing at home I get a lot more out of the talk.

I sometimes pretend I'm translating to Spanish (I don't know near enough Spanish to do this, but in my mind it is okay to make the English words with a Spanish ending and not worry if anyone else would understand). this doesn't work as well, but it still keeps my mind on listening and so I get more out of it.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#45

Post by leephillips »

Some of these techniques are impressive, but they don’t work for me. My notes take the form of drawings: flowers, aliens, bugs, geometric diagrams—whatever makes it look like I’m paying attention and prevents my forehead from violently impacting the table.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#46

Post by dougmwne »

akio wrote: post #40
dougmwne wrote: post #2

For me, I really like Zoom recording paired with the automatic transcripts. The transcripts help me to find the section of the video I need to review. I wish there was a feature to tie your typed notes into the video timecodes so by clicking on a note I had made, I could jump to the point in the meeting where I had made the note.

Grain[0] is what you're looking for. (Disclaimer: I work at Grain.) It lets you take notes during your meeting that are timestamped to a recording and transcript. It also lets you share clips from your meeting both after and live during the meeting. It indexes your transcripts to make your meetings searchable later, and does a lot of other things to maximize the value you extract from meetings. [0] https://grain.co

That's awesome, I'll check it out. Thanks!

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#47

Post by alohaandmahalo »

mgbmtl wrote: post #20

I often have (virtual) meetings with clients, and there may be 3-5 people of their team on the call, and I might have a colleague also there. To make sure meetings aren't a waste of time, each of our clients has a Gitlab space on our self-hosted Gitlab, and while screen-sharing, I open their Board, which is in a sense the meeting agenda. Then I open each issue, and I take notes while they are talking. If the discussi…

Love this approach to using GitLab to incorporate intentional documentation in sync meetings. I work at GitLab, and we use the platform to collaborate, but I've not used it as described here. We'll have to give it a try!

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#48

Post by puchatek »

bluGill wrote: post #44
warkdarrior wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tell myself that, but in truth the main value in taking notes is it forces me to pay attention. When I'm not daydreaming about how I would make the last point in a different way (thus missing the current one), or thinking about whatever project I'm doing at home I get a lot more out of the talk. I sometimes pretend I'm translating to Spanish (I don't know near enough Spanish to do this, but in my mind it is okay to…

Muy cleverito

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#49

Post by puchatek »

ultra_nick wrote: post #26
irrational wrote: post #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.

I don't understand. Do you have to look at the keyboard to type? Notes feel as natural to me as talking.

What about talking to a person about the previous topic while listening to another person talk about the current?

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#50

Post by jdp123 »

dougmwne wrote: post #2

For me, I really like Zoom recording paired with the automatic transcripts. The transcripts help me to find the section of the video I need to review. I wish there was a feature to tie your typed notes into the video timecodes so by clicking on a note I had made, I could jump to the point in the meeting where I had made the note.

Check out Notiv.com

Notiv provides this experience and post meeting will extract your action items and provides an index into the topics discussed.

Note, I work at Notiv.

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