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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago, my boss at the time taught me a valuable lesson: every meeting needs an official record(/log/minutes/whatever) documenting all noteworthy decisions (D), tasks (T, with deadline and responsible person), and information communicated (I), with that record being sent to all participants by end-of-day.

The reasoning being simple:

If anything of consequence was discussed in the meeting, then the official record is a valuable documentation (and the basis for the next meeting).

If nothing of consequence was discussed in the meeting, then the meeting was a waste of time and should never have taken place in the first place. Somebody wasn't prepared for the meeting they scheduled.

Like a good commit message, an official record as described above is cheap (doesn't take more than 2-3 minutes to write) and often delivers a fantastic ROI.

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Roberts Rules indicates that the secretary (the one who records the meeting) is one of the most important roles.

To the point: according to Roberts Rules, the #1 most important item in all meetings is finalizing the meeting notes from the previous meeting (ie: Everyone agrees that the stated meeting notes are correct).

Every meeting, according to Roberts Rules, starts with an understanding that everyone at the new meeting agrees upon the summary of the previous meeting. If you cannot agree to this, then the current meeting cannot progress (because the current meeting is almost inevitably "based upon" the previous meeting). Fixing the errors in documentation is incredibly important.

Which is exactly why you send the notes by end-of-day. People get the chance to object ASAP, and are otherwise bound to the record going forward.

Roberts Rules recognizes that if there's a conflict in two stakeholder's view of the notes, the only resolution is to call a new meeting.

(Ex: Person A thought that 3-weeks was the agreed upon delivery date. Person B thought that "3 weeks after next Tuesday" was the agreed upon delivery date.)

Who is correct? Person A or Person B? Maybe PersonC or PersonD have insight into the issue. Regardless: the solution is to call a new meeting to clarify and finalize this "meta-issue".

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Since you're calling a meeting "anyway" to finalize the record, the time to finalize the notes and resolve any conflicts is during the "next meeting", whenever that is.

Bringing up those conflicts as soon as possible is important (and should be in email-form under the modern business). But determining the solution to these conflicts is the very decision-making framework that meetings are designed for.

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If the current record is on Person A's side "Three Weeks delivery date". Then the imperious is on Person B to bring up the misunderstanding no later than "the next meeting", wherein it is assumed that the previous record is finalized.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter "what was said" at the previous meeting. All that matters moving forward is the record of what was said.

> People get the chance to object ASAP, and are otherwise bound to the record going forward.

Agreed: the sooner objections are raised, the better. Though it is important to note when the record is finalized officially. "The next meeting" is the most logical time to finalize the record.

EDIT: I should note that I've upvoted you. I feel like you and I are on the same page, I'm just elaborating a bit.

> (Ex: Person A thought that 3-weeks was the agreed upon delivery date. Person B thought that "3 weeks after next Tuesday" was the agreed upon delivery date.)

You should surely call a meeting to clear up the conflict as soon as possible.

Another interesting angle would be, "What can we do to make the situation doesn't happen again?". One way would be to document delivery dates in the dd/mm/yyyy format. Therefore, the action item in the meeting note should be "X does Y by 13.10.2020".

This Action Item is put in real-time on the screen during the meeting itself. So, yes I agree with you that sooner is better. In my world, the sooner happens in the meeting. Therefore, I have dedicated note takers during meetings who are coached to run meetings. Most of these note takers do not even need to be individual contributors.

tangent / "rant" about date formats: they have an actual standard^1 that is chrono-sortable:

YYYY-MM-DD

it's only ambiguous to the degree that people adopt other "conflicting" conventions.

I wish v much for its adoption. It was established over 30 years ago.

1. ISO-8601 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

I am with you on this. In addition to keeping all the own dates under my own control in this format, I make it a habit to routinely use this date format in non-consequential handwritten forms (guestbooks, permission slips, checks, receipts), to build awareness of this date format and help it "win".

My rule of thumb is if the input area is free text, and the benefit of my filling in the date is to the benefit of the form-owner, I'll use ISO-8601 dates and incentivise them to learn the standard. Join me!

So much this! For all my notes, communications, and such I use YYYY-MM-DD. Only when dealing with the public (or non-technical family members) do I use more colloquial date formats, and then whenever possible I use something like Jan 2 2021 when written.

imperious -> impetus

Personally, I prefer to pre-empt this situation by an explicit agreement on Action Items (Who does What by When) during the meeting itself. I have a dedicated note taker who has been coached to ensure this takes place.

Ideally, no one makes mistakes and everything is well understood the first time around.

But in my experience: humans have errors (Ex: Notetaker writes down 1/2/2021 instead of 2/1/2021). Having a formal "last call" for record-changes is useful for catching these mistakes.

The aim of the prevention measure is to minimise mistakes or errors. I am not against a "last call", I don't want to get to the last call. Generally, we write a clear Action Item live on the screen - "Who does hat by When". The Action Items are locked during the meeting itself. If there are syntactic errors, these are corrected without a follow-up meeting as the intent during the meeting was clear.

In my entire management experience over multiple years, the "not well understood" part has never happened. If I were to guess, it could be due to the goal setting exercise at the beginning of a project. I, as a lead, sit down with the team and clearly outline "Roles and Responsibilities" and "Decision Making Processes". In addition, "Success Criteria" are set beforehand and are strongly linked to organisational goals (business or otherwise). Just to let you know, I work with domain experts across different unrelated industries including technology.

Can you say more about your dedicated note taker? Is this someone who personally attends meetings? Someone who gets a recording? Is this their full time position, or are they a EA?

Sure! This person attends the meeting and has the full responsibility to document Decisions and Action Items (Who does What by When). The person is the moderator of the meeting but not an individual contributor. The person has the full right to ask "Who is the Action Item for? By When will you finish the Action Item? What is the Decision we took?". All meetings are driven towards decision making and action items, no matter how small.

The role and responsibility of this person is clearly communicated to the team before the project. The person is aggressively coached before the project. In one case, live examples of note taking were provided with the note taker as a reticent participant of the meeting.

I once worked somewhere that had an employee who took notes during every meeting, to what seemed like an annoying level. After every meeting, he emailed everyone who attended the meeting a copy of his notes.

A couple jobs later, we were discussing changing where some images were hosted. It seemed very strange to have them in their current location, and the process that copied new images to that location was clunky.

My manager at the time said, "Well, that's what we decided what the best way to do it was."

I responded with, "Well, what were the reasons for doing it that way, and what were the other options considered?"

He said, "I don't remember."

At this point, I mentioned it might be a good idea to keep notes of any meeting we have, as it would be useful to go back and have a record of that.

His answer was, "I don't think it's a good use of someone's time to record meeting notes."

This was a meeting that involved about 12 people, 9 of which had no real say in the matter (field techs, etc).

> I once worked somewhere that had an employee who took notes during every meeting, to what seemed like an annoying level. After every meeting, he emailed everyone who attended the meeting a copy of his notes.

Can you share what company was that? If not the company name, at least the industry?

I used to do that.

Hmm... I probably should pickup the habit again. When you move around projects, sometimes you forget about the "good habits" from previous projects...

Not the person you responded to, but when I worked at State Farm they had 'Organizational Support Specialists' who did this and other clerical odd jobs. Unfortunately they were pretty high turnover, it was rare to have one at the start of the project and still have the same person at the end.

Small manufacturing company. This guy was a controller/CFO

I find taking notes helps me to stay focused on what is being discussed especially if it's not a topic I have a particular personal interest or "stake" in. I have found this doubly important in remote meetings as it's easier for your mind to wander slightly when you're physically distant from those who are doing most of the talking.

It's less easy to do if it's a meeting you're deeply involved with yourself as it's hard to note and talk at the same time.

If I'm calling a meeting, I'm sending out the agenda and meeting notes and expect the same of meetings I attend (and decline if there's no agenda sent beforehand).

Plus side is it really cuts down on pointless meetings since many times people just want to call meetings to avoid doing actual work, and with documentation responsibilities falling on the meeting caller, they have to do more work, not less.

Downside is the strong correlation between people who suck at meetings and people who suck at taking notes. Which can be pretty frustrating because you know who the pointless poorly run meeting people are, but you also can't rely on the notes if you skip.

> A long time ago, my boss at the time taught me a valuable lesson: every meeting needs an official record(/log/minutes/whatever) documenting all noteworthy decisions (D), tasks (T, with deadline and responsible person), and information communicated (I), with that record being sent to all participants by end-of-day.

"Who does What by When" is the overarching management philosophy of such meeting notes. In projects which I lead, I have a dedicated person every meeting to document these notes. Totally worth it and it's now a must for all of my projects.

Something I'm a big fan of for wfh meetings is inline comments in quip.

1. Everyone read and leave comments on a doc

2. Overall comments

3. Go through each comment/discussion in the doc, put a final comment on each with the discussion results

Found the Amazonian :P

The semantic tagging is nice, I might start incorporating that into my notes.

On the overall topic of meeting notes, I picked this up as a new skill in the past year and it's been immensely valuable for myself and the people I meet with.

Specifically, I learned how to take realtime notes during the meeting while also listening and paying attention. It took practice but was achievable.

One key to success here is to explicitly ask for a helper to take notes while I speak. I've found this helps make the note taking seem like a whole team effort.

Colleagues have noticed and valued the notes and they do seem to lead to better meetings.

Some related advice on meetings, stolen from Getting Things Done: every point discussed in a meeting should result in one or more agreed and recorded next actions. This helps keep things clear, focused, and concrete.

I think detailed notes aren't as critical as just documenting decisions. Anything not written down is forgotten. This is why I prefer having critical conversations over slack. Every word is preserved in context.

> I think detailed notes aren't as critical as just documenting decisions.

Decisions and Action Items. A decision leads to an action items. The action items are usually topics for decisions next meeting OR a deliverable at the get go. In case of the former, the action item is to put the topic on the meeting agenda by the deadline. In case of the latter, the person is assigned right there in the meeting with a timeline for the deliverable.

Curious—your abbreviations D,T,I—do you formally incorporate these into the record?

Fantastic rules, I 100% agree with your advice (and your boss').

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