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by Rochus·5y ago·view on hn ↗
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.

1 comments
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.
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.