Ask HN: How to get better at taking notes?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419478

by thiscatis • 7 years ago

58 15 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've tried so many different tools, both digital and the good old pen and paper. A new note taking app comes out and I'll try it for a few days and then get lost. Same for paper notes. I scribble during the first few meetings but never follow up.

What are your strategies on taking good notes without missing the actual conversation or meeting?

How do you make sure you consistently keep track of notes?

And also how can I improve following up on notes and using them as a base for next meetings and decisions?

Rannath• 7 years ago

1) use something like teeline shorthand, or just record the meeting. This will allow you to keep up with the meeting. I generally use short hand, recording makes people nervous and doesn't always get everyone anyways, unless you have a really nice mic. I try to keep a complete record of the meeting, instead of picking and choosing what to write down. After a while it becomes second nature and you can get away with barely paying attention to your note-taking.

2) after the meeting convert your shorthand into some organized, clean notes. This helps you solidify your understanding and allows you to make decisions after you have all the information. You might want to keep your shorthand around for your record, at least for a bit.

3) decide, immediately after 2, what you're going to do about those notes, and when. I use an app that shows me specific notes at specific times. If something is priority I do it immediately, or have an app remind me in an hour/day. If I'm waiting on someone, I note that, and set a reminder to check back in. If I need to keep an eye on something I set a reminder to check on it.

4) When notes expire (and they always do eventually), they get emailed to me at home. Once a day a script zips them and sticks them out of the way. I manually move them onto a flash stick once a month.

NB: This is a habit I picked up in college, and modified for work. I wrote my unnamed note app myself, it's not on any marketplace.

Jtsummers• 7 years ago

Write meeting minutes.

During the meeting, you're scratching down notes, action items, and thoughts. After the meeting, within the day, preferably right after, re-form those notes into a proper set of minutes:

- Meeting Purpose & Time

- Bulleted list of items discussed, sub-bullets to capture more details, this should closely mirror the agenda (if there was a formal one)

- Bulleted list of action items (what needs to be done, by who, and when)

Share with the other people that attended the meeting. If this is strictly internal, it's easy. If it's with customers, share with your internal team first for concurrence nad then send out to the customers.

==================================

Listen for the key points. I'm buying a house in a new city (moving in a few months). When speaking with the agent I didn't need all the details she listed off, key ones popped out:

  Buyer's agent's commission (3%)
   - Usually paid by seller
   - Buyer owes if purchase is a for-sale-by-owner property
  Home inspectors usually run $500-1000
    - Due to rules in state, agent can't recommend a particular one
  Better school districts are ...

My wife was on the phone, I made sure that she agreed with my summary. Contacted the agent after the call to make sure I had all the details correct.

==================================

Action items, taskers, whatever you want to call them, make sure these are sent out. Put them into your todo app, into Jira, into whatever you or your organization use. Do not just leave them on the minutes or in your notebook. You will miss a lot of work if you try and do that. Bullet journaling is a pretty good way (has worked for me) to track tasks for the near future. Omnifocus is my go to app for my personal tasks (Windows at work, so until the web version comes out I can't really integrate it easily into my workflow at the office).

==================================

Agendas should be made before every meeting. A meeting without a clear agenda is an opportunity for waste and distraction. Sometimes the agenda is broader than others, I have a weekly meeting (part of a general process improvement effort) that basically consists of general (non-whining, I cut that off) discussion amongst peers. The purpose is to share knowledge and identify areas for improvement. Sometimes I have key topics to discuss, but often I hold the meeting just to keep the habit and discussion alive. While it's regular, that's not the majority of my meetings. Most of my meetings have a clear purpose: status update on projects, discussion of upcoming training requirements, announcement of changes to some information system, etc.

Take the action items that have collected, and put them in the agenda as well. This will keep your customers, managers, team, or whoever up-to-date on the status of issues that are important to them.

m-p-3• 7 years ago

I like the idea of putting minutes to keep track of a timeline in my notes. Now I'm wondering if there is a keyboard shortcut in Joplin to insert a timestamp.

EDIT: Just checked and there is, Ctrl+Shift+T to insert date and time.

jonshariat• 7 years ago

Check out the "Cornell note taking method"

I'm adding some good resources below but in short: - Do it by hand, it increases learning - 2 columns on top: Left: Big ideas + questions, Right: details - Bottom: What you learned, action items

Practice a lot, the more you do it the less effort it takes and the effectiveness goes up.

http://lsc.cornell.edu/notes.html

https://medium.goodnotes.com/study-with-ease-the-best-way-to...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSYnGhlnzyw

guitarbill• 7 years ago

why do you feel like you need notes, instead of just listening and participating? first, try and cut back on what notes are needed. but i get it, sometimes it's necessary.

for action items, i jot them down throughout, spend two minutes at the end to check everybody's on the same page, and then send an email out immediately. it shouldn't be long, and each item should have an owner.

for design meetings, again it needs and owner who should have written a design doc upfront. i prefer it be send out in advance, but i've also heard of the amazon thing where everybody just sits there for the first 10 minutes and reads it. i guess that way, you don't have to make time beforehand. either use a collaborative editing tool, or have the owner project the doc and make changes as you go.

for other stuff, use a whiteboard and then take pictures of that. i wouldn't bother writing it up, it's just a good reference if needed.

finally, reducing the number of meetings will reduce the amount of notes you'll need to organise. depending on your role, you may just need to delegate more.

icedchai• 7 years ago

Use a google doc. Send yourself an email. Or don’t. I realized I never looked at most of my notes anyway.

EliRivers• 7 years ago

To get better at something, deliberate practice with swift reinforcement often proves a successful tactic.

Are you trying to improve by just taking notes and hoping you somehow get better, or are you deliberately practicing and assessing your own performance, and repeating note-taking practices to deliberately improve?

muzani• 7 years ago

I'm a compulsive note taker, as it helps me to organize my thoughts better. I think the book, "How to Read a Book" gives the best advice for this, even for listening.

First, take note of the terms used. Things like "capital markets" or "startup" which may mean very different things to different people. Especially useful for technical talks, where you can get buried in jargon.

Look for the information "pillars". These are the things that support the rest of the content. They are information dense, and thus difficult to understand. They feel like speedbumps. If the speaker spends a lot of time reviewing it, it is likely an information pillar.

You also have to practice dealing with a flood of information. Speed reading helps - learn to convert information into images, or categorize and link it to other information as soon as it arrives. You can practice with anything - articles, Wikipedia, holy books.

I really prefer taking notes electronically because it's easier to swap between a glossary of terms and sort out information in different categories as it arrives. But paper works too if you can split out the space for it.

afarrell• 7 years ago

without missing the actual conversation or meeting

One part of the solution is social: persuade the participants that it is useful for someone to send around notes after the meeting with key conclusions and action-items.

If this is socially-agreed, then in the meeting you can say something like: “Pardon, I want to make sure I got that. Can you repeat the part about auditing the data being passed into Salesforce?” This does impose an obligation to clean up your notes afterward, so is risky if you lack confidence in your notes.

I have done this in my previous software engineering job and it was noted positively in my annual performance review.

sloaken• 7 years ago

I hand write notes. I have 4 different notebooks, one is a calendar based. The other 3 are subject based, as I have 3 completely different projects.

The calendar one I primarily use for 'management type meetings'.

For meetings (not the management ones) I usually start a new page, I write the date and topic.

When I write notes I but a mark in front to indicate what action is needed. A box [ ] means it is something I need to do. i.e. share with my people when the next office party is. I fill in the box with a check if done, X if OBE (Overcome by events), F for forwarded (written someone else). Often I will put a comment to my resolution.

At the end of the week, I go through the last week of pages and fill in on the Sunday my new 'to do' list

amursft• 7 years ago

Single notepad that fits in a pocket and a folder at /notes seems to be all that work for me. My naming scheme is always YYYY-MM-DD Some Note Title

Jugurtha• 7 years ago

I have a Markdown template for "Minutes of Meeting" that I use for all meetings. I make sure to capture action items and send it to attendance.

  # 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

I have a git repo called minutes where I save the file under MR_20190325_othercorp.md and push it. Others have access to the repo. I also send an email. The file name year, month, day forces sorting.

I also note the gist of the conversation and some points. Rationale. Notes to self about what can be done. But I find action items super important because it allows tracking.

lostdog• 7 years ago

I keep a hand written notebook, and I just write down high-level points or my own TODO items from meetings...

...but I have found that how I take notes is less important than whether I review my notes. When I set aside a half-hour at the end of the day to review my notes, they become much more effective. Reviewing the notes lets me collect the TODO and followup items, and I become much more likely to complete them. Reviewing also helps me remember the important things that happened during the day. And, of course, reviewing means I notice what I want to change about how I take notes.

dchuk• 7 years ago

I’m working on a proof of concept for a very different style of digital note taking. Think stream of consciousness capturing, with some lightweight tagging mechanisms, and a global search mechanism to slice up the notes however you want. No more folders or files or anything, any “note” is really just a result of a filter applied.

It’s basically what a notepad really is like, which is basically a stream of immutable notes, but harnessing the filtering capabilities of computers.

Hit me up on Twitter if you’re interested, @iamdchuk

Yvonne_McQ• 7 years ago

Here are the apps that could make your note-taking process easier: https://www.slant.co/topics/872/~best-tools-for-taking-notes...

Ask HN: How to get better at taking notes?

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