
Ask HN: How do you take notes? - lumannnn
Hey HN!<p>In a meeting, discussion, talks, or negotiation, how do you take notes?<p>- What tools do you use?<p>- What do you take notes of? Just what&#x27;s been said?<p>- Do you enrich your notes with e.g. drawings &amp; diagrams, in what mood something was said, or who was speaking to whom?<p>- Do you change your behaviour of taking notes depending on what you&#x27;re listening to (e.g. meeting vs. talks)?<p>Thanks in advance for your valuable input and time!
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sverhagen
If I ever get a new job, I buy a new, empty (obviously) notebook, and take
notes. I love the tactility of real paper for that. I'm ooold, I suppose.
After a while I will always notice that, while I keep bringing the notebook to
meetings, I just don't really make notes anymore. Typically someone is
assigned to make minutes (and we're being very agile about that too, different
subject). And beyond that, the gist of meetings typically doesn't require me
to have a written record, so it just goes in the big ol' brain (it just adds
to my existing understanding of our company, our system or the problem
domain). I'm sure that won't work for everyone...

Something that I _do_ need to keep track of is personal to do's, sometimes
driven by personal interest, so these don't necessarily end up in the minutes,
so I often walk out of meetings with one or a few Post-It's. All our meeting
rooms have a decent stack of Post-It's and Sharpies. I incorporate later those
in whatever online task list is most appropriate (team JIRA, some other
backlog, personal to do list), unless I can resolve them immediately.

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flukus
I'm fairly religious about my note taking these days because it's been
important in my last couple of jobs. But all my notes are written with vim and
in markdown format. The markdown isn't important, it just provides some color
highlight for quick visual scanning. If I do paper based notes I just end up
with paper everywhere but I find I'm more likely to read and write electronic
ones. I've developed a system that works for me and I regularly check notes I
wrote over a year ago.

I have a notes project for general notes and a notes folder within each
significant project I work on. Each issue I work on will get it's own file.
This is very specific to my workflow at this company, if I moved companies I'd
develop a workflow that works there. The rest of the company has formal
notes/documentation in a bajillion sharepoint documents that make things
impossible to find, so I prefer my system.

