Ask HN: Tips for taking better meeting notes?

Try handwritten notes. I find it much faster for structuring notes in contrast to any computer program. Instead, write down your notes and things you remember afterwards as a word document.

Also, if there is too much to write down, several people should do notes and join their notes later in some collaborative meeting report. That's one way to ensure nothing gets lost after the meeting. For developer meetings, we frequently rised new issues in our bug tracker which were linked directly from the reports which itself were tickets or wiki pages.

Whenever I'm taking notes, I tend to only write down things I don't already know or understand which tends to lead to shorter list-style notes, each bullet point a gem enticing me to research and eventually fold that concept or terminology into my understanding. If I've got pages and pages of things I wrote down which I already know or can get up and talk about for 20 minutes on the spot... the document may only be 80% useless but I'll treat it as absolutely useless and won't revisit it.

I write in block uppercase, regular lower-case, and cursive, depending on whether it's an action item, an interesting personal note or bit of extracurricular knowledge to follow-up on, or something to transcribe (knowledge or command to be archived) digitally after the note-taking session.

I make liberal use of parens, square brackets and curly braces, which add additional meaning to the different styles of handwriting I employ.