How to Take Good Meeting Notes

One of the keys to performing well in occupations that involve numerous meetings is good note taking. Taking good notes can help one stay focused during boring meetings, serve as great reference material for the future, and even help kinesthetic learners better retain what they've heard.

Steps to Effective Note Taking at Work:

1. Open your mind. Begin thinking of note taking as a way to free up time in your future versus a waste of time and energy or a necessary evil. By taking good notes that are easy to scan at a later date you will retain the information better and save time when it's time to revisit the information. You're stuck in the meeting anyway, so if taking good notes now can free up time later, why not try it?

2. Identify the notes. At the top of the page write (or type) the date, the title, type, or purpose of the meeting. For example: April 4, 2008 - Staff meeting

3. List attendees. If desired or necessary document the presenter and/or attendees of the meeting.

4. Structure your notes in outline format. Remember the dreaded outlines of our youth? Utilize an alpha and numeric numbering system to keep what you are hearing organized. Always think ahead. If there is a meeting agenda, you can often use the topics listed on the agenda as a guide. Outline format will save you tons of time when reviewing or trying to find key points weeks or months down the line.

5. Think "Need to Know". Document all the key items that you need to remember or retrieve at a later date, but keep what you actually write or type brief. For example, Instead of taking the time to write "Beginning in September the committee decided that we will reduce the price for blue pillows to $15", write "beginning Sept, blue pillows $15". These are your notes, so don't hesitate to abbreviate or use personalized shortcuts. Just make sure you'll remember what your "personal shorthand" represents.

6. Call out follow up and action items. Take special note of items that you, specifically, are required to complete or follow up on. I like to use the word "ACTION" to call out such items. Sometimes I underline or circle the word and often (when handwriting notes), I will put the word ACTION in the left margin so that I can't miss it when reviewing notes and adding to my to do list later. For example, "ACTION: change prices in spreadsheet".

7. Update your "to do" list. If you have a lot of action items it is often helpful to review and place your action items directly into a separate "to do" list as soon after the meeting as you can.

8. Review as needed. Review specific meeting notes as needed to recall information and verify that you've completed action items. However, you are a kinesthetic learner you will likely find that just by physically writing or typing good notes, you end up retaining much more of the information than you did prior to taking notes at meetings. As a result, the need to actually go back and review may infrequent, but that doesn't mean the note taking wasn't useful.

9. Mark as complete. Review past notes when you have down time, crossing out information that is complete, not longer relevant or that you know you have fully retained. Crossing things off not only feels great, but will help you to improve your note taking skills by helping you realize which notes were valuable and which were less relevant.