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How to take meeting notes

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Re: How to take meeting notes

#91

Post by tuatoru »

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 "the meeting took 1 hour 30 min with 7 people attending. We decided: - to use mid gray instead of slate gray for menu bar sub-elements" will eventually cause people to wonder, "why did that take so long?", while serving as a written record of decisions for those whose memories are shaky at 9AM Friday, and new team members.

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

Re: How to take meeting notes

#92

Post by simonebrunozzi »

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…

Fantastic rules, I 100% agree with your advice (and your boss').

Re: How to take meeting notes

#93

Post by nvader »

chrisweekly wrote: post #85
tchalla wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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

I am with you on this. In addition to keeping all the own dates under my own control in this format, I make it a habit to routinely use this date format in non-consequential handwritten forms (guestbooks, permission slips, checks, receipts), to build awareness of this date format and help it "win".

My rule of thumb is if the input area is free text, and the benefit of my filling in the date is to the benefit of the form-owner, I'll use ISO-8601 dates and incentivise them to learn the standard. Join me!

Re: How to take meeting notes

#94

Post by ajford »

chrisweekly wrote: post #85
tchalla wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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

So much this! For all my notes, communications, and such I use YYYY-MM-DD. Only when dealing with the public (or non-technical family members) do I use more colloquial date formats, and then whenever possible I use something like Jan 2 2021 when written.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#95

Post by nickjj »

andi999 wrote: post #28
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…

For the second and third paragraph: how do you validate that you really remember these things correctly and not just think you remembered them? For the script remembering: you cant do it. That is basically a profession called acting which takes a few years of training (biggest problem if you try is to do the gestures before the phrasing out, so usually what you do looks and feels unatural). Good advice I got was you…

Validation sometimes comes from external feedback, like "oh yeah, now I remember that but how did you remember that?". Other times it's just trusting I'm not making stuff up based on previous successful recollections.

I wouldn't say I have an especially good memory tho. I guess maybe it's pretty good for days after something but most details trickle away after that unless I specifically focus on remembering them. I'm also pretty bad at memorizing mundane things like what I ate for dinner over the last week.

That advice sounds good. I Google'd it a bit and it sounds like the Loci method that a few other have also commented with. I'll see what I can do, because when I think about previous memories it's super visual, almost like replaying events. I'm not sure how it'll apply to artificially associating paragraphs to objects but we'll see. Can't hurt to try it out.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#96

Post by nickjj »

flreln wrote: post #53
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…

Have you tried the method of loci? I do a variation of it when I don't have writing means nearby to keep the idea in my head. In its essence, you visualize a familiar place (ie parent's home) and how you walk through it and drop what you want to remember somewhere. Works perfectly fine for me. I suspect that's because of grid cells and spatial cognition (more here: https://youtu.be/gmc4wEL2aPQ ).

I haven't, but I'm going to give it a shot.

Interesting talk too. I like how she highlighted that the brain finds numbers to be important.

When doing grocery shopping I often memorize the list based on the item count. Like if I'm going for Italian bread, tomatoes, green peppers, sausages, milk, water, avocados, chicken and bagels I never try to memorize the items. I'll make a note of the count, which would be 9 in this case.

This has a really good success rate for me when it comes to remembering things because during the shopping session I'll think "ok, that's 7 things, what are the last 2 things". Then I'll scan my bag and recall the last 2 things eventually. It also makes it almost impossible to leave the store while forgetting something because 7 != 9.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#97

Post by dmch-1 »

This article reminded me of when I was in academia some people used to take notes of talks with Latex, including typesetting diagrams. It was quite impressive. I tried it myself I think, but I can't remember to what results.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#98

Post by 2bitencryption »

my old manager taught me this beautifully simple trick --

at the start of the meeting, if you're the responsible party for taking notes, open up a new email and add all the meeting attendees (plus anyone who couldn't make it).

proceed to take notes directly in the email during the meeting (following whatever note taking format you prefer)

bonus points if the meeting has no slides/screenshare; in that case, present the notes as you are typing them.

when the meeting ends, while everyone is still in the room, send the email.

boom - immediately, everyone has the outcome, there are no "please forward me the meeting notes", everyone is immediately on the same page, and everyone will see the email when the meeting is freshest in their mind and respond right away if something in the notes does not mesh with their understanding of the result.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#99

Post by nelaboras »

Many commenters here miss that the author seems to refer to occasional (2/week) 1:1 meetings. These are meetings with people he presumably chose to meet.

The post is interesting in how he describes he trialed and found a few strategies that work well for him to remember what he cared about from a meeting. E.g. he rediscovered that association and context are very important and describes how he draws them out. He draws his counterpart to recall the conversation, this is a great application of psychological theory around neural associations.

This is clearly not guidance for business meetings, but a really valuable skill for when you meet interesting people once in a while and would like to remember more of your discussions.

Wonderful post and many lessons to take away. Next time I'm asked at the end of the meeting to try to draft notes from my scrambled scribbles I'll try to recall a bit more context.

Re: How to take meeting notes

#100

Post by nelaboras »

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…

He's talking about a different kind of meeting. A human encounter where you discuss and engage freely with another person.
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