Like many people, I spend a fairly hefty chunk of my working life in meetings and on conference calls. And since there’s nothing more embarrassing than having to call a colleague and ask for a reminder of what was discussed*, I try to write stuff down.
I find it quote tricky to take decent notes when I’m also heavily participating in the meeting; it’s easier when I’m a passive observer, but that doesn’t happen very often. I’ve experimented with typing directly into Evernote on a tablet, with making notes on my PC (plain text files and directly into Evernote and OneNote) and with good old-fashioned pen and paper.
Some Googling suggests that there are actual proper techniques for this sort of thing - dividing the page into quadrants for different kinds of info, arcane symbols that look like I was meeting with Dr Strange, something called the “Cornell Method”, mind mapping… there’s no shortage of the buggers. I’m guessing most of them are better than my current strategy which is “write down as much as possible and hope for the best”.
So, to the Dopers who inhabit meeting rooms: do you have a special strategy or technique for taking notes? Do you like pen and paper, or something a touch more digital?
Cheers,
Rich
*OK, The Thing With The Trousers was more embarrassing than calling a colleague for a reminder, but we don’t talk about that.
I write the notes/minutes on a laptop in the form they will be actually published later - I apply the following principles:
[ul]
[li]Anything that is on the agenda, or in a handout, or in published writing elsewhere, does not need writing down in the notes - just refer to it and grab a copy for filing.[/li][li]Rambling conversations that explore a topic in detail without actually changing anything or resulting in specific actions just get summarised as “a discussion took place on the topic of X”[/li][li]If anyone volunteers to do something, or is tasked with an action, that gets noted down (in simple form; “Action: MT will produce the widget report before next meeting”[/li][li]If anyone says anything of significant impact (i.e. it changes something, or challenges something), that gets written down “MT Noted that solution XYZ cannot be commenced until Q3.”[/li][li]If the conversation gets important and goes faster than my ability to write it down, I speak up and ask for someone to summarise the point for the notes.[/li][/ul]
That might well be the crux of the issue - a lot of the meetings I’m in are free-flowing affairs, rather than formally structured, with discussion going backward and forwards rapidly. Those are the conditions where it gets hard to capture everything, and we don’t usually have a dedicated note-taker. When we compare notes afterwards, I’m sometimes surprised how much more detail others have captured. I guess if I get that clear summary, it would help a lot.
I used to sit in the back of the room and play Tomb Raider on my laptop. My husband once handed our 9 year old daughter the phone while on a conference call with instructions to hand the phone back to him if anyone said his name. No one ever said his name during the 30 minutes she was holding it. On that day she decided to never be an engineer because it was so boring.
Luckily we are now happily retired.
Companies can’t actually physically masturbate that’s why they have meetings.
I’m actually a corporate Secretary – which may sound impressive, but it’s for a tiny California non-profit that exists in order to run a small local science fiction convention. Still, we’re registered with the State, so what I do has some (minor) legal consequences.
I take the minutes. Just paper and pen, and scribble. I can’t record every word everyone says, but I hit the high points by topic and concept. The Board of Directors are very kind, and permit me to ask for the occasional clarification. “Which one of you actually seconded that motion?”
It’s a little dull, but someone has to do it, and I’ve been doing that kind of minutes-taking for a good forty years now. The big key is to know when not to bother. In any meeting, there will be the inevitable fluff. Someone will pop up with a quip. Someone will ask something dumb. One guy will start to explain in painfully tedious detail exactly how to run a car-wash. Those are the bits where my note-taking quietly drifts to a halt. It’s a judgement call.
I mostly paid no attention and daydreamed. Nothing useful ever happens in meetings. I don’t know who invented them, but they and the inventor of clamshell packaging should be forced to meet each other.
OneNote has a pretty cool function where you can record the meeting voice while you take notes (typing or ink). AND it synchronizes the recording and note taking. In other words, if you take notes while recording, it will highlight the notes when you get to that part of the recording…
I am usually the facilitator and note taker, and most of my meetings are virtual. I share my screen with the attendees, the agenda and other materials, and take notes real time while everyone watches. I want people to look over my shoulder and make corrections, and I ask people to confirm what I captured is accurate, as we progress. This way people take a more active role in the meeting, especially when I type their name with some action that everyone else sees. At the end I can ask the group if I missed anything, and I can send the notes out within minutes of concluding.
I also generally follow what Mangetout does in deciding “what” to capture.
My meeting notes are essentially an outline of topic areas, and I generally use pen and paper but can do the same note-taking on a tablet if need be. If people are debating things back and forth, I only write down the end result.
Within this, I write down, and then immediately circle, anything that results in someone doing something that impacts me. (If I am the participant, I only circle the things that I agree to do, but if I am more of a central person on the project, I circle the things that other people agree to do as well, because it will also be my job to follow up on whether or not they did those things.)
When I get back to my desk later, the circled things jump out at me so I can incorporate them into my task list – either doing the thing, or following up with Bob who agreed to do the other thing. I don’t put my notes away until I have initiated some action for each of the circles, even if it’s just to set a calendar reminder for myself to check in with Bob in two weeks.
Also, if it’s a meeting in a room with people I don’t know, during the introductions, I draw a simple diagram of the table and write their initials or name at the position they are sitting, then I don’t need to worry about remembering who they are when they speak.
I do that too. My note taking depends on many factors:
1- Do I care about being here? If not, screw it.
2- Will I get any assignments out of this? If not, hooray.
3- Will I ever be asked about what happens here?
There’s a Dave Sim/Cerebus the Aardvark quip where Cerebus says (of himself in the third person, because he’s like that) “Cerebus amuses himself by counting the adverbs.”
So, in the boring-most meeting I’ve ever been in, I made a graph of adjectives (nobody was using adverbs) related to yawns. It made a lovely parabola as yawns increased.
I work in a company that does periodic conferences with a global customer-base and our meeting notes are published to the entire industry, so it’s important to get them right. Personally I’m pretty good at note-taking because I’m a fairly fast touch-typist and am able to quickly process what’s being said, so I just write down the synopsis of it instead of trying to write verbatim. I also don’t hesitate to politely interrupt the discussion to ask for clarification of a point or to repeat something I missed, as quoted here.
In addition, my company uses these strategies:
[ul]
[li]Two or three assigned note-takers who are not expected to participate in the discussion. If someone does need to participate for part of the discussion, the others cover for him/her during that time.[/li][li]After each day of multi-day meetings, our team huddles* to clean up the day’s notes prior to emailing them out to all participants. This also helps to capture any points that the note-takers may have missed.[/li][/ul]
We’re not allowed to record sessions (for political reasons, and we’ve been smacked down when the occasional coworker was caught violating the rule), so these methods are really critical to our success.
I often use pen and paper, but that’s because many of the meetings I attend have a “only one laptop” rule. If the room looks like an IT convention or if the only laptop is mine I’ll use the laptop. Normally we’ll have a minutes format, with stuff like a table for who attended (including spaces for abbreviations and, if necessary, for signatures).
For those times when things get heated, I’ll mark a stop when they wind down and make sure we all know what we just agreed on, then note that. If we start jumping from topic to topic, again I’ll mark a stop and make sure we wrap up whatever - or at least leave it in a status that we all agree what it is.
We usually have one person in charge of taking notes; if more than one person does, it’s usually because the “extras” needed some way to avoid falling asleep.
My college books were mostly self-published by the student union. Several of them used my notes, because I was so good at trimming things down. One of those books was a twofer: the notes of a guy who took down everything but throat-clearing, for completeness, and mine as the Cliff’s Notes on the Cliff’s Notes.
It’s important to keep in mind that minutes are not a transcript. Not every little detail needs to go down.
I have a good memory so only need to get the key points. For this I bring a large index card or two and put * for each major point and a few key words that will work for me.
Once the meeting is over within an hour or so I will make whatever phone calls, emails or other activity is required and check them off as I do them. I have found that doing whatever right away and not to linger works best for me.
