I tend to only note problems if they’re directly or indirectly my responsibility. If they’re my problem, they’re filed under action.

When I do manage to capture notes on paper, I use a couple of symbols to call out important items on the page. “A” with a box around it is an action, usually for me unless I write someone else’s name there.

A “*” means something important — like a decision or a revelation. Duh!

I use my paper notepad as a capture device, and reference — but I’ve taken to working out of EverNote and Todoist for long-term capture, prioritization and progress tracking.

If I ever finish catching up on Battlestar Galactica I’ll enthuse about them at length.

1. Remembering and understanding what it is you’re all talking about during the meeting and about 20 minutes afterwards: “Note: Enter base, kill mans”
2. Slowing other people down and repeating what they’re saying in a nutshell: “So what you’re saying is, you want to enter my base and kill my mans”

Notes are worthless about an hour after they’re written. Giving a date doesn’t help, because as a key it’s not useful (at least, I don’t think “what were we discussing on the 25th?”, I think “What do we do after entering my base again?”). Any good notes will be all over the place, and will need to be re-written (which I highly advocate, probably in a digital format). However, I do like your Problem/Decision/Action paradigm a lot, which I think will help organise meeting notes a fair bit. I think these three items feed into other systems, however.

Notes are supposed to be good for writing, not for reading. You must translate them into another format to make sure the data you gleaned becomes information, whether it’s an email, a wiki, or anything else.

In short, disagree with the first two points, agree with the last three. Additional points include making a big deal of what you’re writing in the book to slow the meeting down and get people to think, and understanding that if it’s in the book, you’re probably never going to read it again.

Amen on PDAs being the anus of note taking.

I have found that just writing, even scribbling, stuff down makes it stick in my memory much better. Also, once I write something in the notebook, it seems easy to find, the next time I flip through — all kinds of weird memory stuff happening that may not apply for everyone.

I agree, a bit, with Sunny about writing things up/transcribing the notes. For me, that really helps it stick in memory, and also improves my understanding. But I don’t think notes are worthless, and further, I have long remembered something I heard once about writing down directions: never through away your original notes, even if you rewrite them. There is something about the cues that are present when reading the original.

Finally, a notebook near the computer is the ultimate backup. Things don’t crash nearly as much anymore, but being able to refer to error codes and recovery instructions is invaluable.

Ultimately, I wish I could go back in time, and learn how to take shorthand. The one thing bad about notes is that writing stuff down can be distracting, especially during meetings.