#79: Do you bother taking notes?

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When you’re in a meeting or even a phone call, do you write everything down? Whether you listen attentively and then record a summary of events later (mentally or in other form), or you furiously annotate what is happening in real time, it’s a matter of preference which one works.

Some say the act of writing notes help cement things in your memory, like doing revision at school where you’d write a summary of what you were supposed to learn. Or is note taking a mental distraction where you concentrate on the notes more than the nuance of what is happening in the meeting? Or maybe just live in the presence, wing it, and try to remember what occurred later.

Linear people like writing a list of bullets, grabbing key points, comments or decisions as things flow. Other, more visual types might prefer a mind map (or are they just doodling?) The Cornell method prescribes a way of taking notes during the meeting, then revisiting them to take cues and action items, with a summary for later recap. There are many online guides explaining different approaches – in truth, you’ll probably need to try them and see which works best for you.

Whichever one you land on, it’s worth making sure you actually read the notes back – or like some computer programming languages, you’ll end up with write-only notes: they might have made sense at the time, but even their author could look back later and have no idea what they mean.

Perhaps the best way to run a meeting (as well as having an agenda, not making it too long, having everyone stand up to keep them attentive, etc) is to nominate one or two people to take notes and circulate them after the meeting, rather than have everyone taking their own. That deals with the “oh, I’m taking notes on my laptop/phone” excuse too.

Digital Note Takers

If you’re prepared to pay money then there are many options for having an automatic note taker in your meeting; Microsoft pitches both Teams Premium and M365 Copilot as ways of making recordings or transcriptions of Teams meetings, and looking for topics, actions etc.

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The idea is that you can go back into a meeting after the event and see a summary of what happened, with the ability to jump back to a specific point in the recording or transcription (so you can check the note-taker got the gist correctly). You’ll get a list of identified actions and who they’re assigned to.

There are pros and cons to Teams’ approach, though – the recording process is non-intrusive and the analytics takes place in the background, and all the data about the meeting is stored in the M365 tenant of the host.

It’s the organiser of the meeting, however, who normally gets to decide if it’s recorded or transcribed, and only (licensed) users within their organisation will get to see the summary. So, if you’re joining a customer meeting which they arranged, you get no auto-notetaking even if you have a Copilot license on your own tenant. If they share the transcript or recording with you, then you could feed it into Copilot (see Kat Beedim from CPS’s excellent process, repurposed in #47: Using Copilot for (consistent) meeting notes) but that won’t have the same fidelity as a full recording.

Un-Fathomable

Another approach besides having Teams or Zoom make the summary, is to use a 3rd party agent which will do it for you. The market leader is probably Fathom, though there are plenty of other upstart alternatives.

Fathom works by being external to whatever the meeting platform is; you invite Fathom’s “notetaker” to your meeting and it shows up as an additional attendee. This means you may be able to join “your” Fathom to an external Zoom, Teams etc meeting, if the organiser allows attendees to bring additional invitees.

In a similar vein to Teams Premium, it lets you revisit your meeting with audio/video summary linked to extracted notes. You can also share meetings with colleagues who were not present, so they can review actions from events they missed.

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One downside to Fathom’s approach is that it needs to be in the meeting to be able to work; that might be obvious, but it lacks the ability to consume a recorded meeting and generate notes after the event. If you forget to invite Fathom or start it recording, tough.

Also, the very appearance of “so-and-so’s Fathom notetaker” in a meeting which you’re organising can be a bit passive/aggressive; normally you’d be expected to ask if anyone minds you recording a meeting, but having someone bring their eavesdropping sidekick in unannounced can be a bit weird.

The media

Reverting to the old-school activity of people sitting in a meeting, listening, contributing and writing their own notes… what’s the best way to do that?

Pad and pen? OneNote on a laptop? ReMarkable tablet? Ah, that is another can of worms to be opened on another occasion.

#50: Object Oriented browsing notes

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Obscure Computer Science theory had an obsession with “object orientation” some years ago; both a technique in how applications are written but also design thinking on how they might be used. Sensei Steve Jobs, while walking the earth before coming back to save Apple, had a famed obsessions for design and rooted his NeXT computer on an object-oriented approach. The NeXT Cube itself was arguably ahead of its time, but in 1990 cost a cool $10K (that’s about $25K in today’s money). There were few takers, though the odd geek still gets excited to pick them up 2nd hand.

An example of object orientation in user interaction is that you go to a thing you want to work with, rather than a tool with which you want to work. Elements of this are all over UX in Windows, like going to a document in Explorer, and it lets you open, edit, print, etc. Most people will still go to Word and open a file from there; that’s why the Most Recently Used list and Search features exist.

To start something new, you’ll likely open your app of choice then use it to create a file or open an existing one. When did you last go to SharePoint and use the New -> menu option to create a document in situ, much less a OneNote notebook? Exactly.

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There are other places where things are less cut and dried: you might open a notebook like OneNote, Evernote, Notion etc, and start taking notes on a thing you’re working on. Or you might want to be in the flow – in a Teams meeting, or viewing a document on which you want to make some side notes – and it makes more sense to bring the notepad to the side and ideally keep the context so when you revisit that document or that webpage, you’ll (optionally) see the notes you had previously.

Progress is not forthcoming

Sadly, as apps evolve some features are sacrificed perhaps because telemetry tells the developer that they’re not much used, or they just decide that newer things are more important. One key villain in this regard is the “new” (Chromium) Edge browser, which left behind many of the features of the old(“Spartan”) Edge, which might not have been much used but then neither was the old Edge. The dev roadmap appears to focus on more ways to inject adverts and to jam Bing services and Copilot into everything, than to actually make the browser as useful as the one it replaced.

Linked Notes

As covered 18 months ago on old testament ToW 683, OneNote has the capability to be docked to the side of whatever other window is being used, and in some cases, maintains a link to the document that is in the main window.

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You’d create the page you want to make notes on in OneNote, and when Linked Notes are enabled, it will tie back to the Word etc doc you were using in the other window. That way, if you re-open the notes in OneNote you’re only a click away from pulling up the document they relate to.

If you later go to back to it in Word, however, or open the doc directly from Explorer, there’s no obvious way to bring up the notes you were taking, without going to OneNote, finding the page you took the notes on, and perhaps docking the window again. Even the Linked Notes option on the Review menu doesn’t quite work as expected – it’s for establishing a new link, not reanimating an old one.

This is an example where true object orientation would work well – you’d open the Word doc which you had linked to OneNote, and you’d automatically see the notes in a sidebar.

Remember Internet Explorer?

Even ye old IE had an option of being linked in OneNote so you could take notes on a page you were viewing. Sadly, Edge has torched this feature – along with Reading List and one of the more helpful and semi-OO feature, which didn’t use OneNote but was still potentially handy…

Web Notes RIP

Web Notes was a feature of Old Edge, for jotting down simple notes on whatever page you were viewing, and the next time you visited that same page, the notes would be shown alongside.

Imagine if you were looking to buy a house or pretty much any other major piece of shopping; whilst conducting research, you might browse to several properties of interest and could make some notes about each one – near a good school but close to a busy road, nice rear garden, high crime area down the road, neighbour has planning permission to build a house in their back yard…

It could be so useful to jot the notes as you go and have them presented again if you happen to revisit the same page in future (so you remember you’ve already looked into it). If you could later see a list of every note you took, with a link back to its source, so much the better.

Sadly, there is no way to do this in Edge, without relying on extensions. There are many out there but none really hit the brief well – if you find a better one, please do mention in the comments below.

The OneNote Clipper is worth a look if you want to keep a list of notes with links back to pages, but is old school in that you’d go to OneNote to find that list and then see which pages you had commented on, rather than the more Object Oriented approach of viewing a page and having the notes offered to you.

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Perhaps the extension which comes closest to the functional requirement (even if it doesn’t win many prizes for looks) is Note AnyWhere, available from the Chrome store (and can therefore be installed on both Chrome and “new” Edge).

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For ease of use, after installation, click the Extensions icon on the toolbar and Pin the Note Anywhere icon to the toolbar, after which taking notes on a new page is only a couple of clicks away. When you next visit a page, previous notes will be displayed (or you can choose to just show a number on the toolbar by the icon, to show how many notes you’ve made).

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It would be nice to have some simple formatting, and searching previous notes is a little clumsy (requiring you to sign up and sync with the developer’s web front end), but for a free app that doesn’t (yet) nag you to subscribe for extra functions, it’s not half bad.


PS – Remember, this weekend is when Europe (mostly) ends Daylight Saving Time, meaning next week could see clashing of meetings arranged with international attendees, before North America catches up on 3rd Nov. New Zealand and some of Australia has already made the leap.

This topic has been covered ad nauseam on previous ToWs … spring forward, fall back