by Serguey Shinder
For most of my working life I was the person who took notes. Not the minutes, which somebody else was supposed to keep, but my own, typed quickly and nearly word for word in every meeting I attended. People asked me afterwards what had been said and I could tell them. I was quietly proud of it.
In a design review in 2024 the chair turned to me after forty minutes and asked what I thought of the proposal. I had two pages of notes on it. I looked at them, and I did not have a view. I said something general about migration risk, which was true and useless, and the meeting moved on. Driving home I realised I could not remember having thought anything at all during those forty minutes. I had been far too busy.
Typing what somebody says while they say it takes nearly all the attention you have for them. You hear the words, hold a phrase in your head while your fingers catch up, and listen for the next one. What is left over is not enough to ask whether the argument holds, to notice that the figures on one slide do not match another, or to find the question nobody has asked yet. I had filled every meeting with the one activity guaranteed to leave me with nothing to contribute, and I had done it for about fifteen years.
So I tested it for a month. In half my meetings I typed as before. In the other half I closed the laptop and kept a sheet of paper with three headings on it: decided, still open, and what I think. After each meeting I counted how many times I had said something of substance. In the typing meetings it averaged under one. In the paper meetings it was a little over three, and twice what I said changed what was decided.
Nothing that mattered was lost. When a meeting needs a full record, somebody is asked to keep one, and it is no longer me. What I used to capture word for word I now capture as a single line, and when I need the exact wording later I ask the person who said it, which usually produces a better version than the one I would have typed.
The sheet with three headings is still what I use, and the third heading fills fastest, which is the point of it. I had been treating note taking as a form of paying attention. In a meeting I was there to think in, it had been a very efficient way of spending that attention on something else.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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