How to take better notes in meetings
Dylan de Heer
Most advice about taking notes in meetings assumes the hard part is the writing. It is not. The hard part is deciding, in the second the words are said, whether they matter.
That decision is what separates a page of transcription from a page you will actually use. Everything below is about making it faster.
Decide what the notes are for before the meeting starts
A page of notes serves one of three jobs, and they want different things written down.
A record. Someone who was not there needs to know what happened. This is the formal case, and it has its own rules: see how to take meeting minutes.
A commitment list. You need to know what you agreed to. Almost everything else can go.
Thinking material. A strategy session or a client conversation where the value is in the ideas, and you will reread this before the next one.
Notes that try to do all three end up long and unusable. Pick one before you walk in. If you cannot pick, it is a commitment list.
Write less than feels comfortable
The instinct is to capture. The skill is to leave out.
Things worth writing down:
Decisions, and who made them
Commitments, with the name of the person and the date
Numbers, names and anything you would otherwise have to ask for again
The question nobody answered
Anything that surprised you
Things not worth writing down:
Anything already in the agenda or the deck
Context you will obviously remember
The discussion that led to a decision, once the decision is made
Anything said by someone thinking out loud, unless it changed the outcome
That last one causes most of the bloat. People often think out loud before they land on a position. Wait for the position.
Use a structure that survives a fast conversation
Elaborate systems tend to break down in real meetings, because they need you to categorise while listening. Anything requiring more than one decision per line will fall apart the moment two people talk at once.
A structure that holds up:
Four headings, written in advance. Everything lands under one of them, and "notes" catches whatever does not fit. The point is not elegance, it is that you never spend attention deciding where something goes.
Mark actions in a way your eye finds later. A consistent symbol beats underlining, because you can search for it.
Leave the sentence unfinished
If you are writing while someone is still talking, you are behind. Write the fragment and move on. pricing → Q1, M to confirm is enough. You will rebuild the sentence in two minutes, and you will not rebuild what you missed while writing it out in full.
Abbreviate names to initials. Drop articles. Nobody else has to read this.
This is also the one place a tool genuinely helps without taking the writing away from you. Weeve's notepad sits in the recording toolbar and takes the same shorthand, then hands each fragment back attached to the part of the conversation it came from, so the reconstruction afterwards is reading rather than remembering.
The two minutes afterwards are worth more than the hour of notes
This is the step most people skip, and it is where the value actually is.
Immediately after, before the next thing starts, go back through and do three things:
Finish the fragments while you still remember what they meant
Move every action to wherever you actually track work
Write one line at the top saying what the meeting was for and what came out of it
The one line at the top is what makes the notes findable in six months. Without it you are scanning a page of bullets trying to remember why you were in the room.
If you need to send something to the people who were there, that one line is also the first line of the meeting summary.
Some meetings should not be noted by you
There are conversations where taking notes costs more than it returns.
A client telling you something difficult. A coaching session where the person needs your eyes, not the top of your head. An interview where the next question depends on hearing the last answer properly. In those rooms, writing is a cost you are passing to the other person.
The usual answer is to record, and that is a reasonable answer. It is also a decision about where the conversation goes afterwards, which is worth thinking about before you press record rather than after.
Most recording tools send the audio to a server to be transcribed and summarised. For an internal project sync that is unremarkable. For a client conversation covered by a professional obligation, it means a recording of that conversation now exists on infrastructure you do not control, and you are the one who put it there.
The alternative is to keep the processing on the machine that made the recording. Weeve records, transcribes and writes the summary on your Mac, with no upload step, so the conversation stays where it happened. The free Starter plan covers 10 recordings a month. It is Mac only, and needs Apple Silicon with macOS 14 or later.
That is not an argument for recording everything. Plenty of meetings are better served by four headings and a pen, and a recording you never listen to is worse than a note you wrote yourself.
If your notes keep failing, the problem might be the meeting
Notes cannot fix a meeting with no decision in it. If you consistently leave with nothing worth writing down, that is information about the meeting rather than about your note-taking, and it is worth reading what a sensible meeting cadence looks like.
FAQ
Should I take notes on paper or on a laptop?
Paper is slower, which is mostly an advantage, because it forces you to select. A laptop is better when you need to search the notes later or paste things in. The screen is the real cost: a laptop between you and the other person changes the conversation, which matters more in a client meeting than in an internal one.
How do I take notes and still participate?
Accept that you will do both slightly worse, and decide which meeting deserves which. In a meeting where you are mainly listening, take fuller notes. In one where you are expected to contribute, keep to decisions and actions only, and do the reconstruction afterwards.
What if I miss something important?
Ask, in the meeting. "Can I check what we landed on there?" is a normal question and it takes five seconds. It is cheaper than guessing later, and it reads as attention rather than the opposite.
Is it worth using a template?
A simple one, yes. Four headings written before the meeting removes a decision you would otherwise make while listening. Anything more elaborate tends to get abandoned once the week gets busy.
Should I share my notes with everyone?
Only if they were written as a record. Commitment lists and thinking material are usually for you, and sharing them invites corrections to notes that were never meant to be complete. If people need a shared version, write it deliberately afterwards.
