Advice on Note-taking
A coworker of mine recently wrote to me asking for advice on how I take notes. Here is what I wrote back:
For “good” notes I usually do them in two passes. In the first pass, I’m writing for myself, e.g. on Post-Its or jotting live notes in a window, giving myself clues about the important things that happened, decisions that got made, action items / followups, keywords for things that need to be researched.
Then immediately after the meeting (ideally without paging out too much context) I sit down and write a set of notes for an audience that is not-me, covering the material that was presented, the context, and the surprises. Many notes miss out on capturing emotional detail around when different parties got sad/frustrated/surprised/angry. It’s sensitive info so I usually don’t give a wide audience to notes that include these details but they also give clear indicators as to the key narratives of “What actually happened in that meeting and why?” It’s possible to highlight the key parts of the meeting cued by the emotional content of the meeting (good) without calling people out for having emotions (bad). Note for example in the recent big meeting we had in the internal notes section “XXX was (furious/delighted/curious)” that cue the reader into how well a given message was received. I try to look at the face of the primary decision-maker in the room to read them; are they paying attention or on their phone? Are they leaning back or forward? Are they asking questions or just grunting? When do they look pleased or displeased about the content? The face offers a high-bandwidth interface that doesn’t interrupt a presenter; so a simple transcription won’t capture all the context.
The main part is to write up the document for an intelligent but uninformed counter-party who just needs a clear explanation of context and then will be able to usefully act on it. Candidly, this takes time. A recent presentation I did took an hour to present but I spent at least an hour writing up the notes, pulling in the bits that Sherry and Mark had taken down to ensure I covered all the bases with a clear, plain-English narrative. Setting aside the time to actually produce good after-the-meeting notes is rare but makes the meeting dramatically more valuable.
Last thought: it can be helpful with an executive audience to think about summary bullets & action items (with who is going to do what, by when) and when the group will next convene to review progress. Then at the start of the next meeting on the subject, review those action items, which builds trust in actually doing what you said you were going to do.
