Sigh. Started out seeming like an interesting discussion of psychology-of-note-taking, ended up as an advert for yet-another-task-tracker. How disappointing.
As with most things, if you think that something that lots of other people are doing is a waste of time, the problem is probably with how you're doing it and not with the activity itself.
(Note that the author recognizes he was taking notes the wrong way for his needs, and adopted a new way of taking meeting notes.)
The author admitted that but still kept the wrong conclusion for a click-bait title and to sell whatever this Witful product is. This moves it from "wrong" territory into "dishonest" IMHO.
Mmh, that's not my experience. My personal collection of advice for meetings [1] contains GOALs to be achieved with meetings - so there have to be notes beforehand and afterwards... I'm pretty happy with this practise.
I like to scribble down notes during meetings or calls, but not for the purpose of looking at them in the future. Instead, the act of writing them down on paper helps me remember the content far better than if it's just something auditory or visual. Typing doesn't have the same effect for me, so using software to help with note taking is a net loss. Maybe typing up after the fact would help, but that's a significant time sink. Opening a few more tickets in a tracking tool tends to be far more useful.
I feel like this article lacks the sincerity of the problem. Is this really as big of a problem as the blog mentions to the point of building an app around?
I don’t know, but I’ll stick with email/messaging apps and mentioning people. Also keeping a copy of High Output Management handy to make sure I’m using meetings appropriately.
Aside: The title is super click baity. There’s value in publishing your notes somewhere like email so they are indexed for remembering them later. My brain won’t remember what happened in a meeting but will remember we had a meeting.
As an occasional project manager, I have to disagree.
Project meetings notes are often needed to hold people accountable to what they said.
I've had a more than a few slippery developers constantly saying different things about deadlines and complexity during meetings. It was those experiences that force me to take notes very very seriously.
My tip to make it non-confrontational is at the end of the meeting give all developers a chance to review the notes and make updates if they felt I misstated something.
