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.<p>The reasoning being simple:<p>If anything of consequence was discussed in the meeting, then the official record is a valuable documentation (and the basis for the next meeting).<p>If nothing of consequence was discussed in the meeting, then the meeting was a waste of time and should never have taken place in the first place. Somebody wasn't prepared for the meeting they scheduled.<p>Like a good commit message, an official record as described above is cheap (doesn't take more than 2-3 minutes to write) and often delivers a fantastic ROI.
Me during a meeting: I don't need to write this down, I'll remember it.<p>Me after meeting: Arg! I wish I had written that down!<p>Me during meeting: I'm going to write this down even if it doesn't seem important.<p>Me after meeting: Why do I have notes on only meaningless stuff!?!<p>Clearly I have some work to do, but the advice to listen and then write notes after is good, but I would suggest doing so towards the end with everyone involved. Something like "hey let's all review and make tasks lists "
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.<p>There are also various linguistic theories that argue that actual information density (in spoken/written language) is <i>significantly</i> 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 bullet-point and solely remember the most salient and important information. The author's efforts seem like an interesting "memory game," but there are better methods[1] for learning how to remember stuff, if, for whatever reason, that's your end goal.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Haraguchi" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Haraguchi</a>
It's crazy to think at how wildly different memory works.<p>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.<p>I also find it pretty easy to re-trace my day and pick out details, like the orientation of how things were on a table at lunch, or what video game a kid was playing on the train who I happened to be sitting next to from 2 years ago without really trying to recall it.<p>But I'm 100% helpless when it comes to memorizing scripts. I've recorded over 500 technical tutorial videos and most of them were scripted out for a course where I read those words (no webcam so it didn't look weird), but about 100 of them are YouTube videos with a webcam where I just winged it based on prior knowledge with no script or bullets.<p>But now I have a talk coming up next week where I'm giving a 45 minute presentation on something technical that's basically a 45 minute live demo and I can't script it out and it's going to be live streamed. I legit can't even write 15 seconds of words and recall them exactly a minute later. I wish I could find a bullet proof way to do this. I've tried so many things over the years unsuccessfully. Bullets help, but it's super easy to forget critical details with just a few bullets.<p>I hate to draw conclusions but I think I'm very far on the spectrum of being a visual learner that trying to memorize words alone could be impossible for me.<p>How do you memorize lots of words in a specific order when you suck at memorizing words?
While there are some useful thoughts and hacks presented in this post frankly if someone provided something resembling these examples post meeting I'd start by seriously questioning their priorities and time management skills.<p>Cynically speaking one may consider some of the prose and phrasing to be awkward to the point of unsettling - almost "uncanny valley".<p>My experience has been that meetings are almost always so information sparse that a "good enough" recall of relevant details is trivial. I have often been told (and tested as such) that I have a better than average memory but at certain levels of performance this is (essentially) expected.<p>Also be aware that significantly better than average recall of people, places, situations, etc can be very unsettling to others if there isn't a substantial accompaniment of charisma. There are gushing anecdotes all over with the likes of Bill Clinton, Tom Cruise, etc remembering the names of random strangers years after meeting them. Bear in mind, of course, these characters are personally likeable whether they remember your name or not!<p>Meanwhile (especially across genders) the reaction may not be quite so positive when it's "that awkward guy I had a meeting with once a few years ago. I think he might be obsessed with me"...<p>Overall this approach strikes me not only as unnecessary optimization but difficult to impossible to "pull off" for those it doesn't already come naturally to.
Best I have read on meetings including meeting notes is from Steven Sinofsky - goes into different types of meeting, meeting dysfunctions and finally peak meeting function <a href="https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/reaching-peak-meeting-efficiency-f8e47c93317a" rel="nofollow">https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/reaching-peak-meeting-...</a>
Hey HN, I’m the author. Just to clarify: the process is for long personal meetings with people I know and respect, where we discuss ideas and things we’re curious about.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Note taking is a skill we should be teaching in school.<p>This technique is great for subjects which you have existing knowledge.<p>Once you're overloaded with information, recalling those specifics is quite hard without good notes that were taken during the meeting.<p>For example, if you're in a meeting discussing colors for a design you write down the chosen colors. Remembering the path you took to the meeting room nor the blue shirt the client wore will help you recall what shade of chartreuse they wanted.
Is substack the new medium? I saw a link to it for the first time a couple weeks back (at least the first time I registered the name) and now it seems to be everywhere.<p>Yes I'm aware of the phenomenon that makes you notice things more after you notice them once. Not that.
Another trick is to follow up a meeting with the minutes of what was said. It is common in meetings for people to disagree and for no clear decision to come out (particularly on a noisy conference call with 20 participants - I am shocked how poor is the audio quality in 2020, doesn't sound like a hard problem to solve). But whoever controls the minutes controls the narrative and the official outcome of the meeting.<p>To the point where for contentious meetings you can have conflicts on who will take care of the minutes.
I have experienced so many meetings where nobody took notes, and the next day hardly anyone was able to say exactly what was discussed, that I don't think this is reasonable. In my opinion, meetings are not effective in most cases anyway, because people hardly ever prepare themselves. If people don't even write anything down, time is completely wasted.<p>Since I am a consultant and do not want to waste my clients' time, I take notes in real time. Meanwhile, this works so well that I can look at people and discuss things at the same time. After many years of experiments, I wrote a software myself (<a href="https://github.com/rochus-keller/crossline" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rochus-keller/crossline</a>) that supports taking comprehensive notes in real time.<p>I was in the management of defence projects for many years and finally not only co-chaired the meetings, but also recorded the meetings using my tool and gave minutes to the people (regularly up to thirty participants). In many meetings I projected the screen of my tool so that the participants could read and make corrections immediately.
Never once in my life I thought "I wish I had taken notes when I met person X." I naturally remember something worth remembering to me, and never once I found out that there was something important that was said and I was worse off for not having written it down. Is it just me?
A note to the author: the phrase "first tense" should be "first person".<p>Overall, this seems to be a very laborious process for something not that useful. I'm glad you and the people you've given notes to seem to enjoy it though.
There’s some good stuff here but I can’t help but feel it’s 10x more effort than I want to put in post meeting.<p>If a 1 hour meeting takes 2 hours to write up the notes for, perhaps there was a better way to spend that 3 hours to get the same value?<p>Alternatively, if I’ve got 1 hour to allocate to this meeting, maybe 10 mins of pre-meeting research and notes, 30 mins of focused meeting time, and 20 mins of summarising and post meeting notes would be a better format?<p>I suspect there’s value in the authors techniques for a small subset of meetings. I don’t think there’s much value for most meetings that are internal to a company for example.
Please assume good intent with this comment.<p>I had a bit of difficulty reading this because I was side-tracked by this sentence structure, which appears a few times throughout...<p>"Here’s how my paper notes look like".<p>I see this quite often and I'm having trouble figuring out what to search for to explain it and check if it's correct, and foreign to me, or if it's incorrect. I suspect it's incorrect and that it should either be, "Here's how my paper notes look" or "Here's what my paper notes look like".<p>Can anyone enlighten me on why I see this structure a lot?
> Drawing helps me bring back many other emotion-related things because I begin remembering emotions I’ve implicitly stored (i.e., when the person was angry, happy, loud, etc.).<p>I love the sketches. I learned to draw for that reason, I add sketches to my notes. It also helps me to relax during a meeting and read the mood of the room (if I sketch facial expressions).<p>And, quite often, to share the sketches afterwards creates an opportunity for casual conversation and creating rapport.
> You can delight the people you meet with by sending a detailed note with everything you covered on a meeting (very few people do that)<p>Be careful with your approach with disseminating meeting notes, despite what this article claims, they are not always well received. I've been promoted, in part, for providing this kind of structure to meetings but have also found myself embroiled in a political battles with gas-lighting coworkers.
> If I’m taking this meeting, then I better pay attention to it. And if it’s not worth my full attention, then I shouldn’t spend time on it.<p>Yeah, most of us just end up shoved into lots of meetings we shouldn't be in that we don't care about, or having a meeting we do care about co-opted by a discussion that's irrelevant to us.<p>if i could _only_ be in good meetings i'd do a dramatically better job at remembering them all too.
We're still in the very early stage (6 months old) but we're building a product mixing meeting notes and task management to make sure meeting outcomes actually get done (without forcing everyone in the meeting to use our tool). If you're curious: <a href="https://meetric.app" rel="nofollow">https://meetric.app</a>
Any meeting worth remembering is also worth recording, then you don't have to remember it cause you can just play it back.<p>Seriously, why don't we just record meetings by default?<p>We started doing this with story sizing and it's been great, obviously prompted by WFH, but I think we'll carry on doing it afterwards.
Lawyer here — self-cite (2010): "Note-taking in meetings and phone calls: Three easy habits your lawyer will love you for." [0]<p>Contemporaneous meeting notes are invaluable in legal disputes because they help the lawyers reconstruct a timeline of what happened. Plus, contemporaneous meeting notes tend to be believed more than hindsight witness testimony, which can have credibility problems — as in, people sometimes "forget," or hedge, or flat-out lie.<p><i>But:</i> Meeting notes can also be misconstrued — sometimes intentionally (e.g., by opposing counsel).<p>[0] <a href="https://www.oncontracts.com/note-taking-in-meetings-and-phone-calls-three-easy-habits-your-lawyer-will-love/" rel="nofollow">https://www.oncontracts.com/note-taking-in-meetings-and-phon...</a>
The best note taking experience I ever had was at the very first Startup school. Someone had a collaborative text editor that worked on the local network, and word got around so we all installed it. It was basically a local version of Google Docs, where everyone could edit at once.<p>Basically, everyone wrote down what they thought was important, so you could see what other people thought were important and add to it. Also that way people could correct mistakes other people made.<p>There ended up being maybe five primary note takes, and then maybe 20 or so who were adding small tidbits and another 20 who were mostly just fixing small mistakes, out of a group of 500.<p>And at the end we ended up with an awesome summary of the entire day.
Strongly disagree with not taking any notes during the meeting. I've learned that by jotting down brief comments about the important action points during a meeting, you keep the meeting centered on action points as opposed to a million other things that don't improve your productivity.<p>It's a different world when you do that - meetings actually have a point if everyone knows your goal is to figure out how to act on the information.<p>You can then send a brief writeup of your notes and any additional information. Putting it in writing prevents misunderstandings and causes other to do what they said they'd do.
I used to write notes for my own reference and people would come back to me asking for the notes. Few years back, I started sketching more than write full sentences or phrases. People like that more. I really like it too and I have been meaning to improve my sketching skills.<p>My long-time business partner, co-founder suggested me to read Dan Roam's book[1]. The books are awesome. I hope that I can, one day, draw/sketch half as good as my daughter.<p>1. <a href="https://www.danroam.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.danroam.com</a>
The piece that I think is most important here is the amount of time OP spends on this process post-meeting. It's a ratio of 4:1 in terms of meeting time to recall time. It's this ratio that I think prevents most people from being more deliberate about the time that they spend with other people.<p>I wonder if someone writing software could help with that process. Most note taking tools are very open ended, would love to see more "opinionated" tools in this space.
Some meeting advice that managers over the years have given to me:<p>- If you are leading a meeting, schedule (at least) as much time to prepare for the meeting as the duration of the meeting.<p>- Before each meeting, clearly articulate the POP: Purpose, Outcome, and Process.<p>- Designate a note taker and document all decisions / outcomes / tasks / follow-ups.
my old manager taught me this beautifully simple trick --<p>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).<p>proceed to take notes directly in the email during the meeting (following whatever note taking format you prefer)<p>bonus points if the meeting has no slides/screenshare; in that case, present the notes as you are typing them.<p>when the meeting ends, while everyone is still in the room, send the email.<p>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.
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.
As a former civil servant I've been lumbered with the meeting secretary role on countless occasions. The following thoughts may-or-may-not help others.<p>1. Train your chairperson.<p>The meeting chair is usually an important person. Everyone will be there to influence that person's thoughts - as well as fight their own corner against professional and personal enemies. The secretary is usually someone a lot further down the pecking order. Which means training your chairperson is gonna be a fraught affair. However, if you can demonstrate to your chair that listening to your advice will lead to happier meetings then they may be happier to learn. I call this the "Dark Art of upwards management".<p>The keys to a successful meeting - they vary. But a pretty fundamental key is "what is this meeting about", alongside "what does the chair want to get out of this meeting". Work these out (by any means possible), then ask the chair if your assumptions are right before the meeting starts. Most chairpeople will (in my experience) indulge your questions in a patronising sort of way the first few times, especially if you can follow up on likely arguments that may block successful outcomes. After a while intelligent chairs will be asking you for a summary of the meeting before it starts. Chairs do not like to have their time wasted. Be the person who helps the chair save their time.<p>2. Take notes during the meeting.<p>Never rely on memory recall after the meeting! Your memory will lie to you, especially about the boring bits which turn out to be really important for some of the participants. And use oldskool pen and paper: typing is essentially one dimensional, whereas a pad of paper has three dimensions and pens can draw arrows, bubbles, and (during the boring bits) relevant doodles as well as record word/idea summaries. It should be enough to capture key phrases (which will trigger memories later) - if you need a full record of everything said during the meeting, use a voice recording device.<p>Also, advice for face-blind folks like me. Draw a map of where everybody is sitting at the very start of the meeting, and insist that everyone introduces themselves (for the record) before the bickering starts. Then you can give people numbers or pithy descriptions ("bluedress", "uglytache") to help capture who said what.<p>Nowadays online meetings can be recorded. Personally I think it makes the whole thing a lot less fun. Someone still has to summarise the meeting for the files, or action points, etc.<p>3. Write up a first draft of the meeting summary straight after the meeting.<p>Do not put this job off! Tackle it while the anger at being forced to do the work is still hot in your veins. It does not have to be perfect; it just needs to be in the required format. Fuller notes is best - it's always easier to cut words later than to add them. Pull action points from the notes into a separate document. The action points are the only thing anyone's interested in. But your chair will thank you later if you have a fuller record: being able to say during a subsequent meeting that something has already been decided - and being able to point to the record of that - will save your chairperson the pain of deja-vu ... and give them a reason to like you even more than they already did.<p>Final thoughts ... my ideal meeting lasts no more than ten minutes. If I need to meet someone (eg: client) on a regular basis I will do as much work beforehand as needed to make the meeting as speedy and pleasant for everyone attending. Know what every meeting is for; what I want to get out of the meeting. Know what others want to get out of the meeting before they know themselves. If you know someone will attend the meeting because they really like making everyone listen to their (never-ending!) voice ... lose their invite. If the matter of a meeting creeps way beyond its original scope, or you can see that you have nothing further to contribute, stand up and walk out.
I think that f2f meetings with real people are in the past and any self-respect online meetings software allows recordings. So, what on the mother earth are u talking about