10 How to Take Notes Meeting notes are an important aspect of the lifecycle of a meeting. These notes feed directly into the meeting minutes and are the foundation of the follow up and closure of a meeting. It's often best to capture these notes during the meeting rather than try and reconstruct them after the fact.
In many circumstances, the person facilitating the meeting is also the person who is the scribe. In smaller meetings, this might makes sense as there are fewer people to assign roles to and in larger meetings it might work better as the facilitator is usually the person sharing their screen with the attendees.
Ideally and particularly with more involved meetings, having someone other than the facilitator taking notes can work better as this frees up cycles so that more attention can be paid to running the meeting. The only downside to this situation is that this will require the scribe to transfer the meeting notes to the facilitator quickly after the meeting concludes so that the minutes can be posted within 24 hours.
Regardless of who is taking the meeting notes, there are some rules of thumb that should be considered when capturing the notes...
- Is there enough detail for someone who was unable to attend to catch up?
- Do the notes align to the outlined agenda items?
- Visually is there some separation between agenda topics so that one can quickly scan and find the specific notes of interest?
Going into further details on each of these items, let's start with the level of detail. There should be enough content and context so that someone can follow along who wasn't actually present at the meeting. The notes don't need to be a verbatim transcript of the meeting but they shouldn't be so terse to leave out important details.
Next, as someone is reviewing the notes in comparison to the agenda, there should be some direct relationship to topic headings, paragraphs or even bullets. We all know that meeting sometimes go sideways and topics don't always end up where you expect them to go. In these situations, it's helpful to call this out in the notes. You can make this clear, similar to say an editorial comment, that although the topic was XYZ there was some discussion that took the meeting to talking about ABC instead.
The final thing to consider in the notes is the actual physical or visual layout. The notes should be crafted so that one can quickly scan through the various topics and determine what they might want to skim or do a more depth reading of.
Through the course of the meeting, there will be several bits of information and data that you'll want to make sure gets captured in a manner that allows for easy digestion and understanding by all attendees, whether present or not:
- Attendance
- Decisions Made
- Actions Required (also known as Action Items)
- Binned Topics
It will be up to the facilitator to determine how best to capture these items. Sometimes all these items will be captured into the notes into their own sections by the scribe, but other times the facilitator will own the capturing of these items as the "conductor" of the meeting with the scribe solely focusing on the high level transcript of the meeting.
Once the meeting has concluded and the meeting notes captured, don't forget about posting the meeting minutes within 24 hours. All your hard work could be for naught unless if you're able to take advantage of sending out the minutes in a timely fashion. If the meeting invitation is one bookend of your meeting, think of these notes and in turn the minutes, as the other bookend.
Once you get in the habit of capturing notes and sending out minutes, these two tasks will quickly become second nature to you. Not only will your meetings become better run, but you may quickly gain the reputation of someone who knows how to run meetings that are worthwhile to attend.