Driving meetings and taking notes is hard

[problemstester]

I found it hard to stay completely engaged in meetings with customers and teammates when I had to drive the meeting and take insightful notes. So, I'm building a tool that lets you take time stamped notes and mark important moments in one click.

If this sounds interesting, you can sign up for early access here - https://noteso.theillu.com/

Do you have any helpful feedback for me? Are there any other problems I should pay attention to in meetings? Would love to hear from anyone that has customer calls or a lot of internal team meetings where they take notes.

[Jugurtha]

I use a Cornell note template. I divide a sheet of paper with a straight longitudinal at about one third of the width.

Before the meeting, I have my questions on the left side prefixed with a "Q:" or "?". I'll ask them. I'll write down the answers on the right side.

When I have more questions, I'll add them to the left side, and ask them again.

The right side is also reserved for taking notes of what people are saying not necessarily as an answer to a question.

When there are actions required, I'll note these on the left side prefixed with "@[entity]". The entity is the one that must do the action. If it is an individual, I'll put the name or initials. If it is a company, I'll put the company name.

So, if it's a meeting between our company and an organization called bigORG, and there's an action that must be done on their part generally, I'll just do @bigORG. If it is someone specific, I'll put their name.

I'll then recap them in "minutes of meeting", like this:

  # Minutes of Meeting
  --------------------
  
  ## Date: 2019-03-25T1435
  ## Place: BIGCorp HQ. City, State.
  
  ## Participants:
  
  ### BIGCorp:
  
    - John Doe (jd)
    - Jugurtha Hadjar (jh)
  
  ### OtherCorp:
    - Dilbert (db@othercorp.com)
    - Dogbert (dg@othercorp.com)
    - Pointy Haired Boss (phb@othercorp.com) [Over Skype]
  
  ## Topics:
  
    - Scheduled information sending
    - Information flow
    - Architecture for Project X
  
  ## Details:
  
  OtherCorp has raised some issues for the timeline of Project X...
  Blah blah blah.
  
  ## Actions:
  
  ### BIGCorp:
  
  - [ ] @bc: Send project X estimates by 2019-03-28
  - [x] @bc: Send invoice and cheque for offices remodeling
  - [ ] @jh: Add different schemes for user authentication
  - [ ] @jh: Finalize migrations so we take into account user's timezone
  
  ### OtherCorp:
  
  - [ ] @oc: Expose API end points for user's identity verification
  - [ ] @oc: Cache the results of the most common queries

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427886

[dyeje]

I've used gong.io for this in the past. It produces a transcript and does some other useful stuff. Maybe check it out for UX inspiration.