Fellow Tips: Record Meeting Notes in Real-Time

How many times have you heard “This meeting could have been an email”?

How many times have you left a conference room, virtual or otherwise, feeling like your time could have been much better spent? 

How often did you leave a meeting feeling like your talking points weren’t addressed and that your voice wasn’t heard? 

We’ve all been in terrible meetings and have felt the detrimental effects of them. It’s a pervasive issue that shows up in every company — from startups all the way up to the Fortune 500 — and results in hours of lost productivity.

The good news is it doesn’t need to be that way.

In our Fellow Tips series, you’ll find easy steps that you can take to make every meeting you schedule more productive and worth showing up to.

• Tip #1: Use meeting agenda templates
• Tip #2: Build collaborative agendas in advance 
• Tip #3: Record meeting notes in real-time ⬇️

It sounds straightforward but recording meeting notes in real-time (and collaboratively) will increase transparency with those who are involved in the meeting, as well as create a single source of truth for meetings, teams and projects.

By keeping these notes collaborative, then every teammate will have access to the same notes and the historical record. And those notes won’t be lost if the note taker leaves the company.

Now that the majority of the office world is working remotely, creating a source of truth for the decisions you make at meetings can be critical for team alignment and communication.

• Use presence indicator
• Send notes afterwards to recap the meeting
• Learn some formatting tricks

3 tips to record meeting notes in real-time using Fellow

1 Use presence indicators to see who is attending and contributing to the meeting

See which team members are viewing the meeting agenda, when they last viewed it, and if they are adding to it. 

With the user flags, you’ll quickly notice who is your team’s go-to notetaker. 

2 Send notes afterwards to recap the meeting 

Sometimes meetings may wrap up in a rush. Tie a bow on the meeting by sending out the notes afterwards by Slack and email. You can ensure that the team has the same takeaways and are on the same page for the next meeting.

3 Learn some formatting tricks

Feel free to stylize the notes as you go. This might be bolding important decisions to emphasize them or putting brackets around someone’s name to indicate a comment.

Add emojis, bullets, images, and colours – anything that you think might benefit your team!

And by regularly recording notes, you’ll eventually end up with a long stream of recurring notes to refer back to. Something like this: