Note Taking

Last updated on 2026-09-01 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • What information is important to capture during a meeting?
  • Why are humans the best note takers?

Objectives

At the end of this episode, participants will be able to…

  • Succinctly capture decisions, action items, owners, and deadlines in meeting notes.
  • Describe why human-curated notes are worth investing effort into.

So you’ve been designated the Notetaker for a meeting - what does that mean? Do you need to try to type every word that is spoken? How do you make sure you’re capturing the right information? To answer this question, it’s useful to first focus on what the goal(s) are for having a Notetaker, which are (at least) two-fold:

  • Make a record of decisions that were made, and any significant dissent that was raised.
  • Keep track of any follow-up action items (including who is responsible for them and what the deadlines are!).

Depending on the formality of the meeting (e.g. a Board meeting), you may also have an obligation to provide an official record of the meeting, who attended, and what was discussed and decided.

Callout

Note Taking in Public

We strongly recommend that note taking for your meetings take place in a document that is accessible to everyone invited to the meeting (for example a shared Google doc). If everyone can see notes being taken in real time, the Notetaker will be motivated to actually take notes. In addition, other participants will be able to help out by adding information that is missed, or correcting a point they made if they notice it being misrepresented in the notes.

Why Your Notetaker Should be a Human

You may be wondering why you should bother to take notes at all. After all, most, if not all, video conferencing systems now enable automated note taking with GenAI tools. The makers of these tools claim they can capture conversations, record action items, and circulate meeting notes to participants, without you having to do any of the work! Although these tools are becoming more popular, we strongly advise against relying on them, and urge careful consideration before deciding to use them in your meetings at all. There are a number of reasons to instead trust your note taking duties to a human, including security and privacy, quality, and usefulness of the resulting notes.

Security and Privacy

Although these points have been made in many other venues, it bears repeating that commercially available AI note taking software is a commercial product, built to make money for its creators. Depending on the terms of service for a particular platform, this often means that your meeting data, including the whole meeting transcript, is exposed to the company that owns the tool. This can raise significant issues for confidentiality, data ownership, and copyright. Enabling AI note-taking agents on your video calls can also lead to situations where meeting transcripts, summaries, or recordings are automatically sent to meeting participants, invitees, or mailing lists - including un-official pre- or post-meeting discussions that may have been “off the record”!

Quality

Because all AI tools are dependent on their training data, AI note takers often perform more poorly when speakers have accents different from the majority language community used for training. In effect, this means that meeting participants who are not native speakers of American or British English will be disadvantaged by many popular AI notetakers. The note taking tool may “mishear” a word, phrase, or entire sentence and backfill that information with probabilistic slop.
A note taking tool is also likely to make mistakes in capturing technical terms, field-specific jargon, or company internal terminology, and again, will make up filler to compensate. A human note taker is more likely to ask questions when they are uncertain about what has been said!

Usefulness

With the exception of a few very specialised types of meetings, notes should not be a transcript of the meeting. Instead, they should be a record that clearly and concisely lays out the important points of conversation, decisions made, and action steps needing follow up. An attentive meeting participant is much more capable of extracting meaning from a conversation. Humans are also more likely to correctly identify things like sarcasm, irony, and meaning-laden pauses and therefore to avoid recording a sarcastic comment as a serious decision. Furthermore, if note taking is socialised as a shared responsibility within your meeting group’s culture, other participants are more likely to make corrections and clarifications to the notes in real time, when they notice the note taker has missed or misunderstood something.

Other

Building expectations around shared note taking responsibilities and norms not only gives you clearer, more actionable notes at the end of your meeting - it also ensures a baseline level of critical engagement during the meeting. At the very least, your note taker and backup need to be paying attention, and other meeting participants are likely to be paying enough attention to at least make sure their opinions are accurately captured in the notes!

Callout

AI Notetakers and Accessibility

Although we do not recommend relying on AI tools for record keeping, that doesn’t mean AI notetakers are useless! AI notetakers can be useful tools, particularly for Deaf or Hard of Hearing individuals, and for people for whom the meeting language is not their primary language. We recommend allowing AI notetakers on a case-by-case basis if requested by a meeting participant for accessibility reasons.

How to Take Good Notes

Let’s dig more deeply into what kind of information should be recorded in your meeting notes. To get us started, let’s test out your current note taking technique with an exercise.

Challenge

Catering Decisions (Take 2)

As an individual, pretend you are the Notetaker for the short meeting segment recorded in this video. Watch the recording one time only, and type out whatever information you think is important to be recorded in the notes. Share your notes with a partner and compare. What did you both agree was important? Were there any pieces of information that you captured that your partner didn’t, or vice versa?

A possible set of notes from this meeting might be:

  • Erin: Options are food trucks or venue catering. Deadline to tell venue is end of the week.
  • Angelique: Food trucks had long lines and ran out of food.
  • Toby: Food trucks were really good. Venue options are boring.
  • Rob: Food trucks were good but allergy situation last year. Venue catering would have ingredients list. Safer.
  • Angelique: Venue catering would require us to track orders. Complicated.
  • Erin: No - venue catering is a set order in advance.
  • Rob: What about vegetarian/vegan and gluten free options?
  • Erin: Different set menus available.
  • Toby: We don’t need to decide on the exact order right now.
  • Erin: Correct - just need to decide on venue vs. food trucks.
  • Toby: In favor of food trucks. More variety and more interactive.
  • Angelique: Overlap with Ramadan. Need take-away options.
  • Rob: Agree with Angelique. Vote for venue catering.
  • Erin: Three votes for venue option. That’s what we’re doing. Need vegetarian opinion on final order.
  • Angelique: Want to help decide final menu.
  • Erin: Will tell the venue we’re using their catering. Will send Angelique and Rob menu options. Get choices back to me by Tuesday?
  • Rob: Busy week - can’t look at whole menu set.
  • Angelique: Can narrow down the options and send to you to review.
  • Rob: Ok!
  • Erin: Adjourns meeting.

Action items:

  • Notify venue will use their catering for the conference. (Erin, by end of week)
  • Send Angelique all menu options in our budget. (Erin, asap)
  • Narrow down option list and send to Rob for final selections. (Angelique, ?)
  • Send final choices to Erin. (Rob, Tuesday?)

You and your partner may have captured different levels of detail, and that’s ok! Hopefully, you both identified most of the following key elements:

  • decisions reached (and vote counts if appropriate),
  • what follow-up actions were agreed upon,
  • who is responsible for each action item, and
  • what the deadline is for their completion.

Action items can either be collected into a list at the bottom of the meeting notes, or called to attention with special formatting (e.g. highlighting). Either way, they should be quickly findable by someone skimming the notes.

Additional items that are good to capture in the notes if possible include:

  • major points of opposition or dissent,
  • concerns, cautionary points, or alternative paths forward.

Meeting notes should also include the date and time of the meeting and a list of participants. This makes it easier to answer questions later that may arise about who the decision-makers were on a particular issue. If possible, end your meetings at least 5-10 minutes before the scheduled stop time. This gives your notetaker time to consolidate the action item list and gives everyone else a few minutes for a bio break before their next meeting. In our experience, very few people have ever been unhappy about a meeting ending early!

Key Points
  • There are several good reasons to dedicate human attention to producing good meeting notes.
  • Notes shouldn’t be a full transcript of the meeting, but rather an attempt to capture important elements like decisions and follow-up needed.