Taking accurate, concise notes in meetings is no small feat. It’s hard to capture everything that’s valuable—people talk fast, it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s important in the moment, and the meeting might jump around between different topics.
This was discussed in a recent Reddit thread in the r/projectmanagement subreddit. Taking notes and distributing them to the right people after the fact is often a big part of a project manager’s role.
Even if they have a coordinator they can lean on, I’ve never met a project manager without the necessary organization, prioritization, and decision-making skills for this.
I’ll cover some solutions to make note-taking easier, as explained by project managers in the thread.
Why Is Effective Note-Taking So Difficult?
Note-taking often falls to the project manager, although whether it should is a matter of some debate (more on that later). Here’s how this is summed up by the original poster of the thread:
This is doubly difficult if you’re also leading the meeting—you need to balance this with keeping track of what’s been said and what the action items are. However, there are a few solutions to make this process easier. (Learn more about 7 Pro Tips and Tricks For Managing Projects In monday.com.)
Solution 1: Use an AI Tool
There are lots of tools that use artificial intelligence to assist with note-taking. Using one of these tools can completely take this task off of your plate. These tools are also getting more advanced all the time, so it’s only getting easier to automate this process.
Otter.ai isn’t the only option, either.
Important: You should check your company’s AI and meeting recording policies. Many industries are subject to regulations due to privacy and security concerns. You could also get into trouble for violating NDAs or other agreements.
If you aren’t able to use AI, you might still be able to record or automatically transcribe your meetings (again, check your organization’s policies) to supplement your notes after the fact with any information you might have missed.
What you want to avoid at all costs is transcribing or recording the meeting and then going back to make notes from it after the fact.
Solution 2: Use Microsoft OneNote
If you can’t use AI, this is your next best option.
It’s important to have an agenda in place for the meeting. This will not only ensure you stay on track with what you need to cover, but it will also make taking notes easier. Add your notes directly to the relevant section of the agenda—this will help you more easily keep up with the flow of the discussion.
You can easily integrate OneNote with your email to make distributing your meeting notes even easier (once you’ve cleaned them up). (Learn more about 15 Best Project Management Software Picked For 2024.)
Solution 3: Agenda-Based Notes
This is similar to the above, but it’s a little more difficult without OneNote.
Here’s the basic process:
It’s also worth sharing your screen during the meeting with the agenda and your notes, unless there’s something else that needs to be displayed (e.g. deliverables awaiting feedback). This saves you from having to go back and confirm notes with other attendees—they’ll be able to see your notes and clarify in the moment.
But remember: This will still require some cleanup before you can send the notes out.
4 Other Note-Taking Tips
Here are a few other tips and tricks from the thread that can help you streamline your process.
Prioritize Your Meetings
Don’t treat every meeting with the same level of attention—prioritize accordingly.
Summarize For The Group
Before leaving the meeting or moving on to a new agenda item, summarize your understanding for the group to make sure everyone agrees and is on the same page.
Don’t Be The Note Taker
If you can, designate someone else as the notetaker so you can focus on driving the meeting.
Here’s some ideas for who should take notes instead:
Try A RAID Log
Despite some debate around this, RAID logs can be an effective note-taking tool. Make sure to create one that’s separate from your project RAID log (typically used for risk management), and keep in mind that you’ll need to reformat your notes before sending them out to the necessary recipients.
About Nuala Turner
I’ve been an editor at The Digital Project Manager, an award-winning publication, for three years. I bring a solid editorial eye to the publication and a passion for building a community of experts in the project management space and helping them tell the stories our audience wants to hear.
This article originally appeared on TheDigitalProjectManager.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
More from MediaFeed:
9 Ways to Use AI to Become a Better Project Manager
This article probably needs no introduction—we all know what AI is, the potential it has to disrupt almost every industry (including project management), and what ChatGPT is. I’ll spare you an intro in which I recap the hype train we’re all on.
In the interest of providing you with some useful information on how you might start using AI in your day to day project tasks (which so many LinkedIn-fluencers try and fail to do), here’s a roundup of ways project managers are using it right now.
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There’s plenty of tools out there beyond just ChatGPT (although most of these use cases were tested in ChatGPT)—Notion has released an AI tool, as have Jira and ClickUp.
As you’ll see, in most of these examples, the project manager notes that they had to check and edit things themselves. At the moment, AI is another tool which needs human intervention—it can get things wrong (or sometimes make things up!), so it still needs a human touch.
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Sometimes you need a little help wording that email or Slack message. Maybe you’ve already written the message and need some suggestions to improve your tone or cut it down. Either way, AI tools offer a fast shortcut to the 10 or 15 minutes you might waste away trying to edit it yourself.
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Once you’ve nailed down a project brief, building it out into tasks and phases can be a tedious task. AI is great for speeding up these manual, arduous processes. You’ll be able to slap the tasks and due dates into your project management software (after a thorough once-over, of course).
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Sure, they might not be the most accurate, but your team members likely aren’t accurate 100% of the time either.
As mentioned here, it’s a starting point and as any good project manager knows, you should aim to under-promise and over-deliver. Whatever project estimate the AI gives you, keep this in mind.
@d_feldman
Start by giving the AI an overview of the project scope (make sure to remove any sensitive or proprietary details!) and ask it to generate some risks. Again, you can use this as a starting point.
It can probably give you a few you might not have thought of (especially if you’re new to managing risks), and you can use its output as a jumping off point to generate other ideas.
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Stuck with a budget that feels too small? AI might have some ideas for making it work! You’ll enter an overview of your scope again, and ask it to generate some ideas for reducing your currently planned budget.
Don’t just follow its advice blindly, though! Make sure its suggestions make sense for your project, especially if you haven’t given it all the nitty gritty details.
DPM
AI can write some project documentation for you, as long as you give it the right parameters. You’ll once again need to make sure not to share any sensitive details with it, but it will give you an outline that you can fill in with those sensitive details later. You’ll get a leg up on filling out your project documents with less hassle.
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Get a head start on your background research—try asking it questions you might normally go to an SME for. Of course, you’ll still want to run what it says by a real person at some point, but starting with AI can save time.
And as this particular person mentioned, they still do end up speaking to an SME, which is important when working on projects you’re not an expert in.
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For project managers in more technical roles, part of the job is communicating all those technical bits to non-technical people, which can be a challenge.
The use of AI in project management can save you time by helping to simplify and clarify technical language, so you can keep regular communications with your stakeholders running smoothly. Paste in your text and ask it to simplify your language.
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Even if you’re tracking the right KPIs for monitoring project health and progress, sometimes those KPIs don’t show that there’s a problem until it’s too late.
You need to find the leading indicators and warning signs—AI can help you there. If you feed it your list of KPIs and success metrics, you can ask to identify which of those are leading indicators.
This article originally appeared on thedigitalprojectmanager.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
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Featured Image Credit: Kateryna Onyshchuk/istockphoto.
