[HN Gopher] How to take meeting notes
___________________________________________________________________
How to take meeting notes
Author : flreln
Score : 128 points
Date : 2020-09-21 19:01 UTC (3 hours ago)
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| ckastner wrote:
| 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.
|
| The reasoning being simple:
|
| If anything of consequence was discussed in the meeting, then the
| official record is a valuable documentation (and the basis for
| the next meeting).
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Roberts Rules indicates that the secretary (the one who records
| the meeting) is one of the most important roles.
|
| To the point: according to Roberts Rules, the #1 most important
| item in all meetings is finalizing the meeting notes from the
| previous meeting (ie: Everyone agrees that the stated meeting
| notes are correct).
|
| Every meeting, according to Roberts Rules, starts with an
| understanding that everyone at the new meeting agrees upon the
| summary of the previous meeting. If you cannot agree to this,
| then the current meeting cannot progress (because the current
| meeting is almost inevitably "based upon" the previous
| meeting). Fixing the errors in documentation is incredibly
| important.
| tchalla wrote:
| Personally, I prefer to pre-empt this situation by an
| explicit agreement on Action Items (Who does What by When)
| during the meeting itself. I have a dedicated note taker who
| has been coached to ensure this takes place.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Ideally, no one makes mistakes and everything is well
| understood the first time around.
|
| But in my experience: humans have errors (Ex: Notetaker
| writes down 1/2/2021 instead of 2/1/2021). Having a formal
| "last call" for record-changes is useful for catching these
| mistakes.
| tchalla wrote:
| The aim of the prevention measure is to minimise mistakes
| or errors. I am not against a "last call", I don't want
| to get to the last call. Generally, we write a clear
| Action Item live on the screen - "Who does hat by When".
| The Action Items are locked during the meeting itself. If
| there are syntactic errors, these are corrected without a
| follow-up meeting as the intent during the meeting was
| clear.
|
| In my entire management experience over multiple years,
| the "not well understood" part has never happened. If I
| were to guess, it could be due to the goal setting
| exercise at the beginning of a project. I, as a lead, sit
| down with the team and clearly outline "Roles and
| Responsibilities" and "Decision Making Processes". In
| addition, "Success Criteria" are set beforehand and are
| strongly linked to organisational goals (business or
| otherwise). Just to let you know, I work with domain
| experts across different unrelated industries including
| technology.
| iandanforth wrote:
| Can you say more about your dedicated note taker? Is this
| someone who personally attends meetings? Someone who gets a
| recording? Is this their full time position, or are they a
| EA?
| tchalla wrote:
| Sure! This person attends the meeting and has the full
| responsibility to document Decisions and Action Items
| (Who does What by When). The person is the moderator of
| the meeting but not an individual contributor. The person
| has the full right to ask "Who is the Action Item for? By
| When will you finish the Action Item? What is the
| Decision we took?". All meetings are driven towards
| decision making and action items, no matter how small.
|
| The role and responsibility of this person is clearly
| communicated to the team before the project. The person
| is aggressively coached before the project. In one case,
| live examples of note taking were provided with the note
| taker as a reticent participant of the meeting.
| ckastner wrote:
| Which is exactly why you send the notes by end-of-day. People
| get the chance to object ASAP, and are otherwise bound to the
| record going forward.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Roberts Rules recognizes that if there's a conflict in two
| stakeholder's view of the notes, the only resolution is to
| call a new meeting.
|
| (Ex: Person A thought that 3-weeks was the agreed upon
| delivery date. Person B thought that "3 weeks after next
| Tuesday" was the agreed upon delivery date.)
|
| Who is correct? Person A or Person B? Maybe PersonC or
| PersonD have insight into the issue. Regardless: the
| solution is to call a new meeting to clarify and finalize
| this "meta-issue".
|
| -------
|
| Since you're calling a meeting "anyway" to finalize the
| record, the time to finalize the notes and resolve any
| conflicts is during the "next meeting", whenever that is.
|
| Bringing up those conflicts as soon as possible is
| important (and should be in email-form under the modern
| business). But determining the solution to these conflicts
| is the very decision-making framework that meetings are
| designed for.
|
| -------
|
| If the current record is on Person A's side "Three Weeks
| delivery date". Then the imperious is on Person B to bring
| up the misunderstanding no later than "the next meeting",
| wherein it is assumed that the previous record is
| finalized.
|
| Ultimately, it doesn't matter "what was said" at the
| previous meeting. All that matters moving forward is the
| record of what was said.
|
| > People get the chance to object ASAP, and are otherwise
| bound to the record going forward.
|
| Agreed: the sooner objections are raised, the better.
| Though it is important to note when the record is finalized
| officially. "The next meeting" is the most logical time to
| finalize the record.
|
| EDIT: I should note that I've upvoted you. I feel like you
| and I are on the same page, I'm just elaborating a bit.
| tchalla wrote:
| > (Ex: Person A thought that 3-weeks was the agreed upon
| delivery date. Person B thought that "3 weeks after next
| Tuesday" was the agreed upon delivery date.)
|
| You should surely call a meeting to clear up the conflict
| as soon as possible.
|
| Another interesting angle would be, "What can we do to
| make the situation doesn't happen again?". One way would
| be to document delivery dates in the dd/mm/yyyy format.
| Therefore, the action item in the meeting note should be
| "X does Y by 13.10.2020".
|
| This Action Item is put in real-time on the screen during
| the meeting itself. So, yes I agree with you that sooner
| is better. In my world, the sooner happens in the
| meeting. Therefore, I have dedicated note takers during
| meetings who are coached to run meetings. Most of these
| note takers do not even need to be individual
| contributors.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| tangent / "rant" about date formats: they have an actual
| standard^1 that is chrono-sortable:
|
| YYYY-MM-DD
|
| it's only ambiguous to the degree that people adopt other
| "conflicting" conventions.
|
| I wish v much for its adoption. It was established over
| 30 years ago.
|
| 1. ISO-8601 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
| nvader wrote:
| I am with you on this. In addition to keeping all the own
| dates under my own control in this format, I make it a
| habit to routinely use this date format in non-
| consequential handwritten forms (guestbooks, permission
| slips, checks, receipts), to build awareness of this date
| format and help it "win".
|
| My rule of thumb is if the input area is free text, and
| the benefit of my filling in the date is to the benefit
| of the form-owner, I'll use ISO-8601 dates and
| incentivise them to learn the standard. Join me!
| ajford wrote:
| So much this! For all my notes, communications, and such
| I use YYYY-MM-DD. Only when dealing with the public (or
| non-technical family members) do I use more colloquial
| date formats, and then whenever possible I use something
| like Jan 2 2021 when written.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| imperious -> impetus
| tootie wrote:
| I think detailed notes aren't as critical as just documenting
| decisions. Anything not written down is forgotten. This is why
| I prefer having critical conversations over slack. Every word
| is preserved in context.
| tchalla wrote:
| > I think detailed notes aren't as critical as just
| documenting decisions.
|
| Decisions and Action Items. A decision leads to an action
| items. The action items are usually topics for decisions next
| meeting OR a deliverable at the get go. In case of the
| former, the action item is to put the topic on the meeting
| agenda by the deadline. In case of the latter, the person is
| assigned right there in the meeting with a timeline for the
| deliverable.
| tchalla wrote:
| > 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.
|
| "Who does What by When" is the overarching management
| philosophy of such meeting notes. In projects which I lead, I
| have a dedicated person every meeting to document these notes.
| Totally worth it and it's now a must for all of my projects.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Fantastic rules, I 100% agree with your advice (and your
| boss').
| 8note wrote:
| Something I'm a big fan of for wfh meetings is inline comments
| in quip.
|
| 1. Everyone read and leave comments on a doc
|
| 2. Overall comments
|
| 3. Go through each comment/discussion in the doc, put a final
| comment on each with the discussion results
| bluedino wrote:
| I once worked somewhere that had an employee who took notes
| during every meeting, to what seemed like an annoying level.
| After every meeting, he emailed everyone who attended the
| meeting a copy of his notes.
|
| A couple jobs later, we were discussing changing where some
| images were hosted. It seemed very strange to have them in
| their current location, and the process that copied new images
| to that location was clunky.
|
| My manager at the time said, "Well, that's what we decided what
| the best way to do it was."
|
| I responded with, "Well, what were the reasons for doing it
| that way, and what were the other options considered?"
|
| He said, "I don't remember."
|
| At this point, I mentioned it might be a good idea to keep
| notes of any meeting we have, as it would be useful to go back
| and have a record of that.
|
| His answer was, "I don't think it's a good use of someone's
| time to record meeting notes."
|
| This was a meeting that involved about 12 people, 9 of which
| had no real say in the matter (field techs, etc).
| doublesCs wrote:
| > I once worked somewhere that had an employee who took notes
| during every meeting, to what seemed like an annoying level.
| After every meeting, he emailed everyone who attended the
| meeting a copy of his notes.
|
| Can you share what company was that? If not the company name,
| at least the industry?
| dragontamer wrote:
| I used to do that.
|
| Hmm... I probably should pickup the habit again. When you
| move around projects, sometimes you forget about the "good
| habits" from previous projects...
| bluedino wrote:
| Small manufacturing company. This guy was a controller/CFO
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Not the person you responded to, but when I worked at State
| Farm they had 'Organizational Support Specialists' who did
| this and other clerical odd jobs. Unfortunately they were
| pretty high turnover, it was rare to have one at the start
| of the project and still have the same person at the end.
| jlarcombe wrote:
| I find taking notes helps me to stay focused on what is being
| discussed especially if it's not a topic I have a particular
| personal interest or "stake" in. I have found this doubly
| important in remote meetings as it's easier for your mind to
| wander slightly when you're physically distant from those who
| are doing most of the talking.
|
| It's less easy to do if it's a meeting you're deeply involved
| with yourself as it's hard to note and talk at the same time.
| Rochus wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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
| (https://github.com/rochus-keller/crossline) that supports taking
| comprehensive notes in real time.
|
| 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.
| mongol wrote:
| Can you take the real time notes also if you lead the meeting?
| I think that is often challenging, to request input, try to
| problem solve, making sure the meeting is constructive. Taking
| accurate notes requires myself often to be more passive than I
| can be if I am responsible for good progress. But depends on
| the meeting scope.
| Rochus wrote:
| Yes; I even write down what I say, not only what the other
| people say; it is challenging when several people sometimes
| talk at the same time. Ultimately it is a question of
| practice. I have benefited from the fact that I have been
| programming for many years before that and write very fast
| with the ten-finger system.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| And at the end we ended up with an awesome summary of the entire
| day.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| my old manager taught me this beautifully simple trick --
|
| 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).
|
| proceed to take notes directly in the email during the meeting
| (following whatever note taking format you prefer)
|
| bonus points if the meeting has no slides/screenshare; in that
| case, present the notes as you are typing them.
|
| when the meeting ends, while everyone is still in the room, send
| the email.
|
| 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.
| sAbakumoff wrote:
| 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
| flreln wrote:
| I disagree. Our perception system tracks dozens of parameters
| during f2f meetings that are simply impossible online because
| it's a different medium. It's way, way harder to build rapport
| with someone online.
| flreln wrote:
| 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.
| sparrish wrote:
| I have been to maybe 3 meetings in my entire life that were
| valuable and couldn't have been summed up in a three paragraph
| email.
| nelaboras wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| josep-panadero wrote:
| > 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.).
|
| 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).
|
| And, quite often, to share the sketches afterwards creates an
| opportunity for casual conversation and creating rapport.
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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.
|
| To the point where for contentious meetings you can have
| conflicts on who will take care of the minutes.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I can remember 95% of a 2h meeting, too.
|
| Just not any of the Actions Items assigned to me, or the names of
| any of the participants.
| bachmeier wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| corobo wrote:
| 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.
|
| Yes I'm aware of the phenomenon that makes you notice things more
| after you notice them once. Not that.
| dudus wrote:
| Let's hope so. At least until they get greedy and start to hold
| content for ransom
| flreln wrote:
| I'm not totally happy with Substack, but it's easy to use and
| takes no time to set up. Also, I think their core idea is that
| most posts can really be reduced to a dense email, and if we
| make it easy to send those, we'll do great.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I'm not really happy with Medium but I'm not a huge fan of
| substack either. Not sure why mailing lists with a blog on the
| side is seen as superior to a blog with a mailing list on the
| side.
|
| Coming from somebody who still uses rss, mind you...
| masukomi wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
|
| if i could _only_ be in good meetings i'd do a dramatically
| better job at remembering them all too.
| josefresco wrote:
| Me during a meeting: I don't need to write this down, I'll
| remember it.
|
| Me after meeting: Arg! I wish I had written that down!
|
| Me during meeting: I'm going to write this down even if it
| doesn't seem important.
|
| Me after meeting: Why do I have notes on only meaningless
| stuff!?!
|
| 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 "
| cmehdy wrote:
| Actionable items list + ownership. Even if it is simply to have
| one person (or very small team) spearhead the item, it gives
| accountability and makes it clear to everyone that the issue
| isn't just up in the air.
| jasonv wrote:
| I've taken to just writing simple notes in OneNote during
| meetings. I've found, especially, when I've told people
| something.. it's really helpful for me to know that I've told
| them.
|
| I can also say that.. done properly, when people know that you
| have strong notes for meetings, they tend to take their take-
| aways more.
|
| Even in Zooms, sometimes I'll share my notes at the end of a
| meeting, and I'll copy-and-paste them into an email out to
| them.. Action items get taken more seriously.
|
| I don't take really verbose notes -- just enough that cover: X
| said something, Y asked something, I requested something, we
| reviewed something.
| tchalla wrote:
| A framework which has helped me to write meeting notes- <Topic,
| Key Arguments from Discussions, Decisions and Action Items>.
|
| Decisions and Action Items are the most important parts here.
| Action Items should be the form "Who does What by When".
| Agreement on the Action Items should be taken during the
| meeting itself.
| [deleted]
| dreen wrote:
| Any meeting worth remembering is also worth recording, then you
| don't have to remember it cause you can just play it back.
|
| Seriously, why don't we just record meetings by default?
|
| 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.
| DanBC wrote:
| > why don't we just record meetings by default?
|
| Chatham house rules make recordings a little bit tricky, but
| it's nothing that can't be overcome.
| mirchiseth wrote:
| 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
| https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/reaching-peak-meeting-...
| flreln wrote:
| Thanks for sharing!
| James_Henry wrote:
| A note to the author: the phrase "first tense" should be "first
| person".
|
| 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.
| flreln wrote:
| Thanks for the tip, fixed.
| nickjj wrote:
| It's crazy to think at how wildly different memory works.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| How do you memorize lots of words in a specific order when you
| suck at memorizing words?
| iandanforth wrote:
| As someone who has had to memorize dozens of scripts, both in
| plays and speeches I recommend brutal repetition. In addition I
| recommend making sentence by sentence Anki cards where the
| prompt is one line and the "answer" is the next.
|
| But really if you haven't gone through a speech 50 times you're
| just getting started.
| andi999 wrote:
| For the second and third paragraph: how do you validate that
| you really remember these things correctly and not just think
| you remembered them?
|
| For the script remembering: you cant do it. That is basically a
| profession called acting which takes a few years of training
| (biggest problem if you try is to do the gestures before the
| phrasing out, so usually what you do looks and feels unatural).
|
| Good advice I got was you make a few 'stars', aka minitopics
| and you branch out with on words what you want to say, you
| remember these topics and then you speak naturally. If it is a
| long talk and you must not miss anything then mayve the ancient
| greek method might be good. Take any place you know by hear
| (like your favorite greek temple, or your home) and go mentally
| systematically through it (like counterclock-wise) and place
| mentally on each physical object a topic. To recall during talk
| do the mental walk again.
| nickjj wrote:
| Validation sometimes comes from external feedback, like "oh
| yeah, now I remember that but how did you remember that?".
| Other times it's just trusting I'm not making stuff up based
| on previous successful recollections.
|
| I wouldn't say I have an especially good memory tho. I guess
| maybe it's pretty good for days after something but most
| details trickle away after that unless I specifically focus
| on remembering them. I'm also pretty bad at memorizing
| mundane things like what I ate for dinner over the last week.
|
| That advice sounds good. I Google'd it a bit and it sounds
| like the Loci method that a few other have also commented
| with. I'll see what I can do, because when I think about
| previous memories it's super visual, almost like replaying
| events. I'm not sure how it'll apply to artificially
| associating paragraphs to objects but we'll see. Can't hurt
| to try it out.
| flreln wrote:
| Have you tried the method of loci? I do a variation of it when
| I don't have writing means nearby to keep the idea in my head.
| In its essence, you visualize a familiar place (ie parent's
| home) and how you walk through it and drop what you want to
| remember somewhere. Works perfectly fine for me. I suspect
| that's because of grid cells and spatial cognition (more here:
| https://youtu.be/gmc4wEL2aPQ).
| nickjj wrote:
| I haven't, but I'm going to give it a shot.
|
| Interesting talk too. I like how she highlighted that the
| brain finds numbers to be important.
|
| When doing grocery shopping I often memorize the list based
| on the item count. Like if I'm going for Italian bread,
| tomatoes, green peppers, sausages, milk, water, avocados,
| chicken and bagels I never try to memorize the items. I'll
| make a note of the count, which would be 9 in this case.
|
| This has a really good success rate for me when it comes to
| remembering things because during the shopping session I'll
| think "ok, that's 7 things, what are the last 2 things". Then
| I'll scan my bag and recall the last 2 things eventually. It
| also makes it almost impossible to leave the store while
| forgetting something because 7 != 9.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| 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.
|
| Cynically speaking one may consider some of the prose and
| phrasing to be awkward to the point of unsettling - almost
| "uncanny valley".
|
| 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.
|
| 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!
|
| 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"...
|
| 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.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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?
|
| 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?
|
| 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.
| flreln wrote:
| That's right; the process is for long personal meetings with
| people I know and respect, where we discuss ideas and things
| we're curious about.
| codazoda wrote:
| Please assume good intent with this comment.
|
| I had a bit of difficulty reading this because I was side-tracked
| by this sentence structure, which appears a few times
| throughout...
|
| "Here's how my paper notes look like".
|
| 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".
|
| Can anyone enlighten me on why I see this structure a lot?
| rmk wrote:
| I bet you see this in non-native speakers' writing. Non-native
| speakers tend to subconsciously translate things from their
| native language to English (I'm one, and I find myself doing
| this now and then), and native speakers tend to notice the
| nonstandard usage more than non-native speakers.
| tzvsi wrote:
| Always take notes during a meeting.
| flreln wrote:
| Have you managed to do that and still pay attention to what the
| person is saying? Especially in a one-on-one.
| diego wrote:
| 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?
| watwut wrote:
| I forgot things other people said and regretted not being able
| to recall. Either you have great memory or even worst so that
| you don't even recall that something was said.
|
| The easiest example are requirements gatherings. Tons of things
| are said and they become blurry after a while.
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| Memory capability and behavior is variable. I can remember and
| keep in mind vast swaths of code, but I am capable of
| forgetting someone's name in seconds.
| jseutter wrote:
| I have to meet with new groups of people on a regular basis
| and am likewise horrible with names. My notes in meetings
| consist of first names written down as a map of where people
| were sitting. If I miss a name, I leave an empty spot. It has
| helped me with remembering names. I often never refer to it
| again.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| Probably not in a business setting. But often I wish I'd taken
| better notes during doctor visits.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Situations I wish I had taken better notes (both before and
| after):
|
| - Doctor visits
|
| - Lawyer visits
|
| - Pre-purchase home inspections
|
| - Financial advisor meetings
| grugagag wrote:
| If you don't have the possibility of taking notes and it is
| important pop up a recorder on your phone and use it. When
| you get the chance get over the recording and take notes
| this time. You will know what you want to write down in
| retrospective. You can skip through the parts that are not
| important.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| To add to that, having a notes app on my phone where I
| can, in advance of one of these consequential (but
| infrequent) meetings, accumulate my concerns and
| questions ahead of time is a lifesaver.
|
| Given that my brain is very happy to erase itself while
| in conversation, I've found pre-notes to be an important
| tool in making sure that I come out of those (expensive)
| conversations with all of my questions answered.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Must be nice. Personally, if I don't write it down I will
| probably forget about it. Perhaps I will even forget that there
| was something worth writing down...
|
| I have been big on journaling for my entire life, though.
| [deleted]
| pdog wrote:
| This works well for daily journaling too.
| dvt wrote:
| 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.
|
| There are also various linguistic theories that argue that actual
| information density (in spoken/written language) is
| _significantly_ 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Haraguchi
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree that most meetings are a waste of time.
|
| In fact, a decade ago I made a very simple game for Windows
| Phone as it was launching called Meetingz, where you clicked on
| buzz words that you heard during a meeting to avoid going
| insane (while looking productive). After the meeting, it
| tabulated your BS index and compared the results to previous
| meetings.
|
| During its short lifetime, the app had over 11,000 downloads:
| http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/killercodingninjamon...
| afterburner wrote:
| Clicking on a phone looks productive? I'm surprised, I
| thought it would make you look distracted and inattentive.
| nelaboras wrote:
| He's talking about a different kind of meeting. A human
| encounter where you discuss and engage freely with another
| person.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of time.
|
| Exactly why notes should be taken and disseminated.
|
| Without going to the lengths tchalla describes, simply stating
| meeting duration and number of people in attendance, and
| listing decisions made and expectations raised for deliverables
| will over time reduce the frequency and duration of meetings
| and make them more focused and effective.
|
| Simply seeing repeated examples of "the meeting took 1 hour 30
| min with 7 people attending. We decided: - to use mid gray
| instead of slate gray for menu bar sub-elements" will
| eventually cause people to wonder, "why did that take so
| long?", while serving as a written record of decisions for
| those whose memories are shaky at 9AM Friday, and new team
| members.
|
| If you want to be a hard-ass, just multiply out the duration
| and number attending: "the meeting took 10.5 person-hours".
| flreln wrote:
| You're totally right, and I should have clarified that the
| process I describe is for long informal conversations with
| thought partners, focused primarily on exploring interesting
| ideas.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| I think there is a big difference between a meeting with one
| other person - as the author describes - and a corporate
| meeting of 3 project managers, 2 business analysts, an
| enterprise architect and 3 engineers who didn't think to reject
| the meeting they absolutely didn't need to be at.
|
| Meeting 1:1 you range all over, I often have meetings with
| people that go from work, to our kids, to the weekend, to work,
| back to the kids and then to the pub. All of it is valuable,
| but not all of it is valuable for work. But a year later when I
| remember it was that person's eldest's birthday I've made a
| solid connection.
|
| Equally important is that not every brain works the same way,
| I'd be completely screwed trying to use Vasili's method as I
| have aphantasia. But that doesn't mean others wouldn't find it
| useful.
| nocman wrote:
| "All of it is valuable, but not all of it is valuable for
| work."
|
| ^ you could make the argument that _almost_ all of it is
| valuable for work. The connections you make with other
| people, even on things that do not relate to work, can have a
| huge impact on your relationship in the workplace. Even the
| stuff that just seems like nonsense, joking around, crazy
| dicussions about things that don 't really matter much, etc
| -- sharing those things can be part of building friendship
| and trust, and that can be of great value for work.
|
| Of course, sometimes such things can have a negative effect,
| depending on the person you are meeting with. So you need to
| be aware of that.
|
| Some people are particularly good at building relationships
| this way.
| quesera wrote:
| > But a year later when I remember it was that person's
| eldest's birthday I've made a solid connection.
|
| Everyone is different, and I applaud you for the effort
| involved, but I have to confess:
|
| This sort of thing mostly creeps me out. There's no way you
| remembered it organically, which means that you spent the
| conversation with me trying to identify items of personal
| interest that you could record and replay for some kind of
| social benefit/bonding.
|
| My advice, and this might be what you do already, is to make
| sure a) the _thing_ is important enough to remember on its
| own, and b) your "memory" is vague enough that I don't think
| you're CRMing me.
|
| E.g.:
|
| BAD: Hey it's your wife's birthday on Thursday isn't it? Wish
| her a happy 34th from us!
|
| OK: Hey your wife has an autumn birthday, doesn't she? I
| remember we talked about it last year around this time. Wish
| her a happy one!
|
| GOOD: Oh that's right, we talked about that last year. My
| wife has an autumn birthday too. Wish her a happy one!
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > This is not true. Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of
| time.
|
| Obviously, this depends on the company and the team. If your
| department or team is having superfluous meetings then clearly
| you need to address the elephant in the room before trying to
| optimize memorization.
|
| I've worked at companies that you describe and it is, indeed,
| miserable. However, once I moved to companies that took meeting
| discipline seriously (30 minutes max with few exceptions,
| agenda must be agreed upon ahead of time, people were expected
| to dismiss themselves from meetings that weren't relevant) the
| value of well-run meetings became obvious.
|
| Fix the core problems first, then optimize. There are plenty of
| books, blogs, and articles about how to run proper meetings. If
| your company is the type that thrives on inefficient meetings
| and wasting time, you may have to ask your manager to step in
| and handle meetings for you so you can focus.
| tchalla wrote:
| > Most meetings are, in fact, a waste of time
|
| Let's assume your premise is true. What can we do to change
| this situation? Here are a few things which have helped me
|
| 1. Define Key Objectives for a Meeting
|
| 2. Define Agenda
|
| 3. Agenda has 4 parts - Topic, Owner, Expected Outcome,
| Duration, Time
|
| 4. Owner - The owner of the part of the agenda is expected to
| own the topic and drive it
|
| 5. Owner needs to pre-define the Expected Outcome beforehand.
| Broadly, there could be three outcomes - Information,
| Discussion or Decision
|
| 6. Moderator should keep a strict check on Time. Sometimes, if
| there's a overshoot - the moderator should either ask for team
| agreement to continue the topic for a limited time (10 min -
| for example) until the Expected Outcome is reached. If not,
| stop the meeting and move on the the next item on the Agenda.
|
| Yes, all this is a lot of work. But this fruitful work can
| reduce the total number of meetings to 5-10% of your total work
| time.
| dvt wrote:
| > Yes, all this is a lot of work. But this fruitful work can
| reduce the total number of meetings to 5-10% of your total
| work time.
|
| I totally agree, but I'm usually not in a position to change
| the culture around meetings, nor do I get paid enough to be
| motivated enough to do it. If I ran my own company, the story
| would, of course, be different.
| tchalla wrote:
| > I'm usually not in a position to change the culture
| around meetings, nor do I get paid enough to be motivated
| enough to do it.
|
| I can totally understand you can not change culture around
| meetings in the entire organisation. I would like to offer
| two perspectives.
|
| First, you could however change the micro-culture in most
| meetings which you are a participant. For example, "Hey!
| Thanks for the invite. What are the objectives for the
| meeting? It will help decide my participation for
| contribution". Second, if you are not paid enough, it is
| even the perfect reason todo so. It can buy back more time
| for yourself by reducing meetings! Overall, you basically
| do X for yourself and have more control over your work
| time. So, if you do not want to do it for the organisation
| - do it for yourself.
| dvt wrote:
| > Overall, you basically do X for yourself and have more
| control over your work time.
|
| The company has control of my work time by definition --
| they pay me for my time. How it chooses to use the time I
| give them is the company's prerogative, not mine. I
| really don't care one way or another if it's cool with me
| sifting through Instagram for an hour while someone talks
| about a bunch of nonsense.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| I have similar doubts, but only thinking of the kind of work
| meetings I regularly have.
|
| I think something like a non-technical interview "meeting" has
| a much higher information density.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Why bother? You're filling your brain with junk when you do that.
| Most formal meetings are totally worthless.
| flreln wrote:
| You're right that most formal meetings are a waste of time. My
| process is for long personal conversations with people I know
| and respect, where we discuss ideas and things we're curious
| about.
| dmch-1 wrote:
| 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.
| asciimov wrote:
| Note taking is a skill we should be teaching in school.
|
| This technique is great for subjects which you have existing
| knowledge.
|
| Once you're overloaded with information, recalling those
| specifics is quite hard without good notes that were taken during
| the meeting.
|
| 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.
| dctoedt wrote:
| Lawyer here -- self-cite (2010): "Note-taking in meetings and
| phone calls: Three easy habits your lawyer will love you for."
| [0]
|
| 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.
|
| _But:_ Meeting notes can also be misconstrued -- sometimes
| intentionally (e.g., by opposing counsel).
|
| [0] https://www.oncontracts.com/note-taking-in-meetings-and-
| phon...
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