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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

#51

Post by robertkluin »

svilen_dobrev wrote: post #41

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…

I routinely reference notes from several years ago in meetings. This was a decision we had a substantial amount of debate around internally. In the end we decided that a combination of person and timestamp tags combined with a robust search was a better approach for our users (people with many meetings each day). We've got a lot of work still to do before search is where we want it though. We know that decision isn't going to work for everyone though.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#52

Post by Vaslo »

The conversation between MT, SW, and whoever else it was in the beginning of this article is the most useless business jargon I’ve ever heard. Why would you ever take notes like that? When our marketing team starts using words like velocity and alignment, we just start rolling our eyes at each other and I know they are going to ask for money.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#53

Post by echelon »

dsr_ wrote: post #35
echelon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Directory_Access_P... In the context I used it, ldap = username Essentially all employees have a unique account that is used for email, unix sysadmin, etc., and this is accomplished via LDAP. You can sync permissions, auth, and more between various systems if they all speak the same language. To use our hacker news usernames, yours would be "pdmccormick" and mine would be "ec…

Oh, you mean usernames or GECOS or handles I've never referred to names as ldaps and I would find it horribly confusing to do so...

It's a product of my environment. Everyone here uses "ldap" to mean "user", and it's infectious.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#54

Post by deeblering4 »

In my opinion note taking should be a collaborative effort. All members of the meeting sharing a notepad together, and ideally even the meeting agenda is populated with headings before the meeting starts, allowing everyone to add notes below each heading (and keep it moving along and on task)

After approaching meetings this way I rarely need for my own personal notes. Just a personal reminder/todo list.

Shared notes lead to a shared understanding, and a shared set of actions. It's really quite helpful, especially in remote settings.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#55

Post by maroonblazer »

Vaslo wrote: post #52

The conversation between MT, SW, and whoever else it was in the beginning of this article is the most useless business jargon I’ve ever heard. Why would you ever take notes like that? When our marketing team starts using words like velocity and alignment, we just start rolling our eyes at each other and I know they are going to ask for money.

The audience for these notes is the person who took them. They were in the meeting, you weren't, so there's a ton of context that you don't see, but will be triggered for the notetaker when they refer back to their notes.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#56

Post by mgr86 »

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 take a similair approach. Write down the important points and who stated them. Often times I will simply lead with the Bob: and not write "according to"

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#57

Post by adityakothadiya »

dougmwne wrote: post #17
cyberge99 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Descript does this well. It transcribes a video file and you can click around in the notes window and it jumps to that position in the video. Very handy tool/service. Free for the first fews hours per month(10 maybe), then paid.

I would want something that lets me take notes on the meeting live, then sync them up with the video and transcript after the fact.

Avoma.com does this exact workflow (Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder).

It has collaborative note-editor like Google. So during the meeting, you and your colleagues can take notes in the same document, or you can also take private notes.

All manual typed notes are linked to meeting recording and transcript to refer back the context later on.

On top of that, Avoma's AI will also extract some additional notes - like Action items, etc.

And if you or AI missed taking some notes, you can highlight the transcript text to add it to Notes.

It's the best blend of human intelligence working with artificial intelligence to create most structured notes, in the least amount of time.

And it works with all conferencing providers – Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting, etc. So you don't have to worry which conferencing supports recording or not. It's always taken care for you.

Hope this helps. Feel free to check it out at https://www.avoma.com.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#58

Post by XorNot »

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…

This is what I feel - I've done aggressive note taking, and then realized after a period of like 5 minutes I cannot recall a thing that was actually said or discussed.

...which, if the notes are the goal - why have the meeting? If they're not, then they're not needed.

In practice, I have fairly good recall, but there's also the basic element that I'm really struggling to recall any meetings I've ever had where anything useful actually got discussed (that couldn't have been an email). Maybe last week when I got my manager to explain some wider context of a project in a 1 on 1, but frankly, my current team has issues that none of the stakeholders have produced any briefing or priming documents (way more organizations should look at how the military structures briefings and provides operational context - they do a better job then the rest of us).

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#59

Post by zhte415 »

Take a picture of the whiteboard at the end of a constructive discussion and email that to everyone.

The absolute worst thing is someone with a laptop struggling to type everything down, or everything they feel like transcribing, and not participating in anything.

Re: My approach to taking notes in meetings

#60

Post by louderthanwords »

You've been looking for https://mindup.co/. I met Jonathan, their CEO a couple weeks back... he's one of the most down to earth founders I've ever met... he help create #yesphx... and a couple other startups. I'm requiring our entire company to start using his product this next quarter.
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