Hello! I’ve been in approximately 1,200 meetings over the past few years (I counted for a quarter once and extrapolated, so that number is probably wrong by a few hundred either way). And the dirty secret is: most of the notes I’ve taken were useless within 48 hours of writing them.
Not because I wrote them badly. Because I was writing the wrong things.
Recording vs. capturing
There’s a real difference between recording a meeting and capturing it. Recording is writing down what was said. Capturing is writing down what matters for people who weren’t there, or for you in three weeks when the context has faded.
They’re not the same skill. A recording might faithfully document that “the team discussed the migration timeline.” A capture says “decided: migration moves to Q3, Sofia owns the infra prep, target date is August 15.”
Most meeting notes are recordings. They’re accurate but useless.
what to actually write down
The simplest framework I’ve found is DADO. Four things:
- Decisions – what got decided, and by whom
- Action items – who is doing what
- Deadlines – by when
- Open questions – what’s unresolved and who needs to answer it
That’s it. A meeting where you capture those four things reliably produces notes that actually drive work after the meeting ends.
Everything else is optional context. Background, discussion summary, disagreements that didn’t resolve into a decision, interesting ideas that got parked. Some meetings benefit from having more of that documented. Most don’t.
One thing I’ve noticed: the “open questions” category is the most commonly skipped, which is exactly backwards. Open questions are the things that will come back and bite you later. Writing them down, with an owner assigned, is the difference between “we need to revisit the permissions model” turning into a real ticket versus disappearing until someone runs into the problem in production.
the laptop vs. pen debate
There’s a Princeton study that found handwritten note-takers performed better on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. The paper is real (Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, 2014). The finding is real. The catch is that it measured learning, not documentation.
If your goal is to learn and retain the meeting content, pen and paper probably wins. If your goal is to produce a shared artifact that your whole team can reference and search, pen loses badly. I’d also add: in a fast-moving technical discussion, typing is faster, and faster capture means fewer gaps.
I think the laptop-vs-pen debate is mostly a distraction from the real question, which is: what are you trying to produce?
virtual meetings are different
In person, you can glance at someone’s face and tell whether they understood a decision or need clarification. On Zoom you can’t, or at least not as well. This means your notes need to be more explicit about what was decided, because there’s more ambiguity about whether everyone in the call was tracking the conversation equally.
The practical consequence: in virtual meetings, I’ve found it useful to do a 60-second verbal summary at the end before the call ends. “Here’s what I heard as the decisions and next steps, does anyone want to correct anything?” That surfaces misalignments before they become problems, and it means the written notes have been validated by at least one other person.
For virtual meetings especially, AI note-taking tools have gotten genuinely useful. Craqly can transcribe and summarize meeting content in real time, which means you can focus on actually participating in the meeting rather than trying to write and think simultaneously. The summaries aren’t perfect (no tool’s are), but they give you a solid base to edit rather than starting from a blank document.
the template question
Templates help if you’re in a lot of similar meetings. A recurring 1:1 has a different structure than a project kickoff, which has a different structure than an incident review. Having a starting template for each of those isn’t bureaucracy; it’s consistency that makes the notes easier to scan later.
The minimal template for most meetings: date, attendees, decisions (with owner), action items (owner + deadline), open questions (owner). That fits in five lines and takes less than two minutes to set up.
Getting the notes out fast
Notes sent within ten minutes of a meeting ending are significantly more useful than notes sent the next morning. (I don’t have a study on this specifically, but ask anyone who’s tried both.) The reason is partly accuracy (your memory of what happened is fresher) and partly behavioral (people are more likely to act on something that arrives while they’re still thinking about the meeting).
The flip side of this: don’t send notes so fast that they’re incomplete. A partial set of action items is worse than a complete set sent an hour later, because people will act on the partial version and then be confused when the full version arrives.
That said: if you can send the DADO items within the first 15 minutes, do it. The rest of the context can follow.