Note-taking is essential. Unfortunately, it may not always be useful, depending on your approach and strategy (or lack thereof). The most detailed and in-depth notes often end up being nearly worthless given the context in which they were taken. To ensure that your notes are a useful and productive task, keep these note-taking tips in mind.
1. Organize Topics
Organization is extremely important. It’s common to jump around to different topics during meetings. However, your notes should not follow the exact flow of a meeting. Instead, it should be grouped by topic. This makes it much easier to reference later on and avoids duplication as well.
2. Be Brief
One of the most helpful note-taking tips we can offer is to be brief. You’re NOT a court reporter whose job is to capture what was spoken word-for-word. In fact, please don’t; human speech is often somewhat incoherent when written down verbatim. It is also tedious to read excessive amounts of text in search of valuable tidbits. Instead, focus on briefly summarizing discussions. Whenever possible, use bullet points instead of paragraphs.
3. Use Discretion
Since you’re not capturing every spoken word, use discretion in selecting what to include in your notes. For instance, it might not be necessary to include every opinion expressed; just note final decisions resulting from those discussions. For brainstorming sessions, decide whether you need to include every item listed or just the ones chosen for further debate. There are cases where knowing what’s been ruled out is useful, but more often than not, you may never need that list again. Use your judgment in deciding what may be referenced later and is therefore worth including in your notes.
4. Provide Context
Have you ever come across a short phrase written on a piece of paper and have no idea what it means? Notes are only valuable when they are written with context. Keep this in mind when you are taking notes. Always provide context!
5. Focus on Action Items, Decisions, and Requirements
Action items, decisions, and requirements are the three most important things you should be capturing in your notes. Action items serve as the foundation to keep everyone aligned and moving forward. Decisions are the ultimate purpose of meetings and are among the most important details to document. Requirements are the finer details that enable everyone to tackle action items and achieve common goals.
6. Highlight Common Elements
As certain elements repeat in your notes, find a way to highlight and code them. For example, perhaps you draw a box around action items, put a star next to decisions, insert arrows next to requirements, circle names, and underline dates. This is a great visual tool to quickly find these elements later on.
In addition to focusing on the above while taking notes, there are other things you can do before, during, and after meetings. Before meetings, create an agenda. This helps with meeting flow and note taking topics. In fact, you can even prepare note headings and bullets ahead of time. During meetings, use other tech tools to save time. For instance, after brainstorming on a whiteboard, take a photo of the list instead of trying to hand write or re-type it into your notes. After meetings, look through your notes to highlight sections, expand details (where needed), and/or add more context.
In summary, remember that less is MORE. Taking good notes is often crucial to completing projects and accomplishing company initiatives. By keeping the above note-taking tips in mind and honing your skills, you can take and keep effective notes that are easily referenced and endlessly useful. Meetings can be messy (even with an agenda), but that doesn’t mean your notes need to be – find the signal in the noise!