I have always struggled with trying to actively focus in meetings and take notes simultaneously, plus the fear of missing out on the details of the meeting for later use I take notes, but then I might lose touch with being active-minded sometimes in the meeting.<p>Most of you are geniuses and this might be not an issue I am sure but for others like me, who struggle to keep up with both of the attentive tasks at hand, how do you manage your note-taking during meetings?<p>Thank you for your time to read this.
Write down a few short words for reminders then after the meeting try and remember in more detail what was said. And ask for a follow up email on info that's too much to take in in the meeting. Meetings should be about alignment, not as a lecture or for bulk information transfer anyway.<p>If you're actually interviewing people, ask to record it or bring a scribe with you if you can.<p>Ymmv, I consider myself a mediocre note taker, and I mainly try and set things up so I don't have to rely heavily on notes I've taken.
I once tried to take notes on a laptop, but gave up on that years ago. I now take notes on paper. I listen for a few categories of things: todo's, discoveries, open questions and next steps (which I guess are like todo's, but with more commitment from a specific person.)<p>I tend to avoid writing everything down and focus on the things I know I might forget (or their might be dispute about later, which is why I ALWAYS write down next steps / todos.<p>I think if you try to write EVERYTHING down, you'll be too focused on writing down what you just heard, you sometimes miss the next thing that someone says or don't have time to think about your response (if any.)<p>Some meetings related to open source projects I've been involved on are done over zoom (or skype in the old days) -- most people gave permission to be recorded for those meetings, so it's easy to go back and replay something you might have missed. So you can focus on writing down only the highlights (like decisions, open questions, next steps) and for details like IP Addresses, specific versions, hostnames, etc. you can just go back and find it. But I think most corporations I've encountered really don't want recordings of internal meetings in case there's a law suit.