Hey HN!<p>In a meeting, discussion, talks, or negotiation, how do you take notes?<p>- What tools do you use?<p>- What do you take notes of? Just what's been said?<p>- Do you enrich your notes with e.g. drawings & diagrams, in what mood something was said, or who was speaking to whom?<p>- Do you change your behaviour of taking notes depending on what you're listening to (e.g. meeting vs. talks)?<p>Thanks in advance for your valuable input and time!
If I ever get a new job, I buy a new, empty (obviously) notebook, and take notes. I love the tactility of real paper for that. I'm ooold, I suppose. After a while I will always notice that, while I keep bringing the notebook to meetings, I just don't really make notes anymore. Typically someone is assigned to make minutes (and we're being very agile about that too, different subject). And beyond that, the gist of meetings typically doesn't require me to have a written record, so it just goes in the big ol' brain (it just adds to my existing understanding of our company, our system or the problem domain). I'm sure that won't work for everyone...<p>Something that I <i>do</i> need to keep track of is personal to do's, sometimes driven by personal interest, so these don't necessarily end up in the minutes, so I often walk out of meetings with one or a few Post-It's. All our meeting rooms have a decent stack of Post-It's and Sharpies. I incorporate later those in whatever online task list is most appropriate (team JIRA, some other backlog, personal to do list), unless I can resolve them immediately.
I'm fairly religious about my note taking these days because it's been important in my last couple of jobs. But all my notes are written with vim and in markdown format. The markdown isn't important, it just provides some color highlight for quick visual scanning. If I do paper based notes I just end up with paper everywhere but I find I'm more likely to read and write electronic ones. I've developed a system that works for me and I regularly check notes I wrote over a year ago.<p>I have a notes project for general notes and a notes folder within each significant project I work on. Each issue I work on will get it's own file. This is very specific to my workflow at this company, if I moved companies I'd develop a workflow that works there. The rest of the company has formal notes/documentation in a bajillion sharepoint documents that make things impossible to find, so I prefer my system.