The Meeting Used to End When You Closed Your Notebook

Picture a meeting years ago: a conference table, a stack of stapled agendas, and at least one pen that worked only if you scribbled hard enough on the back page first. Somebody asked who was taking notes. Everybody looked at the agenda.

Eventually, a person picked up a notebook and wrote down the important parts. A deadline. A name. A decision that would probably be revisited at the next meeting. If the conversation wandered off into somebody’s story about the parking lot, the pen stopped moving.

This wasn’t a flawless system. Handwriting could look like evidence recovered from a flood. You might get home and discover that “send revised numbers” was missing the small detail of who was supposed to send them. Still, the notes were usually short enough to read without scheduling another meeting.

Now a phone can record an in-person conversation and turn it into a transcript. Zoom’s My Notes feature is one way to do that. I can see the appeal. A pen can’t go back and check what somebody said while you were trying to get it to write.

But the first question has changed. It used to be, “Who’s taking notes?” Now it can be, “Are we recording?” Followed by the pleasant moment when everyone considers whether their unfinished thought needs to be preserved in writing.

Back then, the person with the notebook had to decide what was worth putting on the page. Today, the transcript can save the entire discussion, including the part where six people work out which Tuesday they mean. We’ve taken the one job the note-taker was doing and postponed it until after the meeting.

Somebody still has to find the decision in there. Somebody still has to check whether “we should think about that” became an action item, or was just a polite way to move on. The phone can catch the words. It can’t make the meeting have fewer of them.

There was an awkward little ritual at the end of the old version. The note-taker would look up and ask, “So what are we actually doing?” People would answer, sometimes reluctantly. A name got written beside a task. The notebook closed.

Now it’s possible to leave with a record of everything that was said and still need someone to ask that same question.

The notebook didn’t capture every word. That was one of its better features.