
Ask HN: Tips for taking better meeting notes? - bradleyankrom
As my career as a developer progresses, I&#x27;m being included in more and more meetings (gathering requirements, team development, etc). I find it difficult to take effective notes without losing track of what people are saying while I&#x27;m writing. What are some of your tips&#x2F;tricks for capturing meaningful notes?
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chmielewski
Whenever I'm taking notes, I tend to only write down things I don't already
know or understand which tends to lead to shorter list-style notes, each
bullet point a gem enticing me to research and eventually fold that concept or
terminology into my understanding. If I've got pages and pages of things I
wrote down which I already know or can get up and talk about for 20 minutes on
the spot... the document may only be 80% useless but I'll treat it as
absolutely useless and won't revisit it.

I write in block uppercase, regular lower-case, and cursive, depending on
whether it's an action item, an interesting personal note or bit of
extracurricular knowledge to follow-up on, or something to transcribe
(knowledge or command to be archived) digitally after the note-taking session.

I make liberal use of parens, square brackets and curly braces, which add
additional meaning to the different styles of handwriting I employ.

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ktpsns
Try handwritten notes. I find it much faster for structuring notes in contrast
to any computer program. Instead, write down your notes and things you
remember afterwards as a word document.

Also, if there is too much to write down, several people should do notes and
join their notes later in some collaborative meeting report. That's one way to
ensure nothing gets lost after the meeting. For developer meetings, we
frequently rised new issues in our bug tracker which were linked directly from
the reports which itself were tickets or wiki pages.

