There are others you can look up. Verbatim note taking means you are hearing the words but spending your time focusing on copying them rather than distilling/understanding them or putting them in context. Letting your brain process the information is more effective than trying to memorize the information.
I've found listening and jotting down short concise notes every now and than about something important is the best.
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 everything is in short term memory to summarize it. If somehow I don't remember a point, it's usually not important enough to write down.
I'd say if 2 people in a meeting take that approach and and consolidate their notes at the end, you're going to get a complete picture of what just happened.
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.
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.
...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).
My way to avoid that is: - avoid taking notes until a topic is exhausted - be the "obnoxious guy" that always says: "so, recapping blah blah blah". - If everyone agrees to my recap I write that down.
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
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.
I either need to concentrate on the discussions or I concentrate on writing notes. If I try to do both at the same time I fail at both - badly.
I either record the meetings, ask a collegue to help take high level notes - then immediatly after the meeting put more detail in them from memory - then circulate (asap) the actions for feedback/ comments etc..
failing that, I will stop the meeting to write stuff down - ideally sharing the whiteboard, and this process showing everyone the degree of my (seriously) bad spelling, bad grammar and the amazing ability to completely miss multiple words out (or reverse the word order)
Notes feel as natural to me as talking.
ldap1: This thing
* ldap2: No that thing
* ldap3: Because of this reason
* AI(ldap1): Fix that thing
ldap3: What about X?
* ldap1: I think X is at risk
* ldap2: We have an alternative from [this vendor](link)
...
* AI(unassigned): Investigate vendor alternative to fix X
Google Docs creates TODOs automatically around "AI(ldap)" and correctly attributes them.
If you're in a multi-stakeholder meeting, you can present the notes and even have multiple people backfilling with links, screenshots, etc.
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 "echelon". Companies may choose to make these based on personal names, but it's not required.
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 discussion is too quick, I stop folks and tell them "one second, we should write this down, it's important but I'll forget". And before moving to the next topic, I ask every-one to validate.
Towards the end of the meeting (usually 30-45 mins), we then go back to the board, and re-prioritize if needed.
In parallel, I have a paper todo list, where I write down the issue numbers that I really need to prioritize, or other notes that the client should not see.
Obviously this does not work for all types of meetings, but we also do this for our internal company meetings and it's fairly efficient. In the past I would only use paper, but I ended up with lots of paper that I lost track of.
1) Use no tech.
2) Cornell-inspired note-taking paper with topics in the left margin and speaker names/notes/sub-topics in the main body. There's room for mind maps if you wish.
3) Actions go in the bottom field so they are easy to find later and mark off when done. If you need to reference something in the body notes for follow-up or action (because you don't have time to write something at the bottom of the page), put an A in a circle next to the relevant sentence.
4) Meeting notes are stapled together and filed in chronological order in a ring binder, divided by working group/meeting name or topic. You can then remove a bunch of notes from previous meetings to take into the current one for reference.
Here's a Word doc of my blank Cornell-type paper:
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.
At that point the meeting leader simply facilitates and people assign themselves tasks as the agenda is discussed and notes are taken/shared.
If those notes also happen to be some collaborative app (e.g. Google sheets) that allows attendees/team members to view/filter their own data it's even better.
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.
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?
> This was the difference between being good and great at my job. It’s the stuff that, when missed, no one really notices, but when you’re on top of it, people think you’re superhuman.
Before starting work at a large company, I would have scoffed at the idea that "remembering little stuff" could ever be "superhuman."
Now? I'm right there with the author. The people I work with who consistently come to meetings with updates like "oh, and I took care of <small-but-important thing>" are my heroes.
Instead of simply noting concerns, I ask if there is an actionable item, then note the action.
> CL: I don’t think Azure AD is the right choice for end user auth
would become
> CL raised concern about Azure AD option, @RF to revisit specific concerns with stakeholders by EOD tomorrow.
(the action would be highlighted for followup task assignment as appropriate).
Note: this approach is more appropriate for small-runway implementation projects with decision makers (or empowered individuals) attending, where decisions need to be made quickly or escalated.
The main challenge with taking notes during meetings is that the tools use were designed for drafting in a non-linear environment. But notes in meetings are directly related to the content of what is being said at a specific moment in time, and the text-only notes usually fail to capture the full essence compared to watching that part of the video.
When building my last start-up, an online school on Zoom, we recorded every lecture so our students could go back and review the content during the working sessions. But they found it hard to correlate their Google Doc notes with the moment in the recording they wanted to go back and watch. But since we pulled over the Zoom chat log with timestamps back to moments in the recording, they started taking notes there so they could keep track of the part they knew they wanted to watch later or reference.
Long story short, when the online school got acquired I started my current start-up https://grain.co to turn that insight into software anyone could use to better capture and share knowledge during any kind of meeting.
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...
I started moving more towards sketches that depicts the idea, relationships, and the likes. I have suggested the books by Dan Roam[1] earlier and I'd still recommend them today.
Today, for instance, if I'm in a meeting for a product feature; by the end of the meeting, my notes are usually the starting point for the product team (designers, engineers) to get started.
later ask for "Action Items" "Meeting notes".