Online Minute Taking Training vs. In-Person: Which Works Best?

Why Your Note Taking Strategy is Failing Everyone – An Operations Expert’s Reality Check

The notification from my calendar warned me about another session where someone would be wasting important time on comprehensive minute taking.

The fact about meeting minutes that business consultants never address: most minute taking is a absolute misuse of time that creates the appearance of documentation while actually stopping productive work from getting done.

The minute taking fixation has attained levels of bureaucratic insanity that would be amusing if it wasn’t wasting enormous amounts in lost productivity.

The problem isn’t that documentation is unnecessary – it’s that we’ve converted minute taking into a pointless ritual that serves nobody and wastes substantial quantities of useful time.

Here’s a true story that perfectly demonstrates the dysfunction of traditional minute taking practices:

I was hired to assist a financial services company in Melbourne that was struggling with serious delivery problems. During my investigation, I learned that their senior team was conducting regular “coordination” conferences that lasted over four hours.

This individual was earning over $100,000 per year and had twelve years of industry expertise. Instead of participating their valuable knowledge to the conversation they were functioning as a glorified stenographer.

But here’s where it gets truly bizarre: the organisation was simultaneously employing multiple different technological capture tools. They had AI powered documentation software, digital equipment of the whole conference, and various team members taking their individual detailed minutes .

The meeting addressed strategic topics about campaign development, but the person best equipped to guide those decisions was entirely focused on capturing every insignificant detail instead of analysing productively.

The total expense for recording this single lengthy conference exceeded $3,500 in calculable expenditure, plus countless hours of staff time managing all the multiple outputs.

The absurdity was completely lost on them. They were throwing away their best valuable resource to create minutes that no one would ever read again.

The digital advancement was supposed to streamline meeting documentation, but it’s really created a administrative nightmare.

I’ve consulted with organisations where employees spend longer time managing their meeting documentation than they spent in the original session itself.

I’ve worked with companies where employees now waste longer time managing their technological documentation records than they spent in the original conferences being recorded.

The cognitive load is unsustainable. People are not engaging in decisions more effectively – they’re just handling more administrative burden.

This perspective will almost certainly irritate many of the legal professionals seeing this, but comprehensive minute taking is frequently a risk management theatre that has very little to do with real accountability.

The fixation with comprehensive note taking often originates from a basic confusion of what compliance bodies really require.

I’ve consulted with organisations that waste thousands of hours on complex minute taking procedures because a person at some point informed them they required extensive records for compliance reasons.

The result? Enormous expenditures in time and money for record keeping systems that offer minimal benefit while substantially undermining operational effectiveness.

Real responsibility comes from actionable commitments, not from extensive records of each word said in a session.

How do you balance the demand for accountability without destroying meeting outcomes?

Use the proportionality principle to conference minute taking.

The vast proportion of sessions benefit from only simple decision tracking: what was committed to, who is responsible for what, and when deliverables are required.

Everything else is administrative noise that generates no utility to the organisation or its goals.

Eliminate wasting your senior people on clerical duties.

A regular staff catch up shouldn’t benefit from the same level of record keeping as a strategic conference that makes major financial decisions.

Develop straightforward categories: Zero documentation for routine discussions, Basic action tracking for standard business meetings, Detailed documentation for high stakes meetings.

The expense of dedicated record keeping services is usually much lower than the economic loss of having expensive professionals spend their mental energy on administrative tasks.

Separate between meetings that need detailed minutes and those that shouldn’t.

I’ve worked with organisations that employ professional minute takers for critical sessions, and the value on expenditure is significant.

Save detailed record keeping for meetings where commitments have contractual implications, where different parties require agreed records, or where detailed project strategies require monitored over long durations.

The key is ensuring deliberate decisions about record keeping levels based on actual need rather than defaulting to a universal method to each sessions.

The hourly cost of professional documentation support is typically significantly lower than the productivity impact of having senior experts use their expertise on documentation work.

Use meeting platforms to reduce administrative work, not expand the process.

Practical digital approaches include simple team action management tools, voice to text applications for efficient record creation, and electronic coordination applications that reduce coordination burden.

The key is selecting tools that serve your meeting purposes, not systems that create focuses in their own right.

The goal is digital tools that enables focus on important decision making while seamlessly capturing the necessary information.

The goal is technology that enhances focus on important conversation while seamlessly managing the necessary documentation tasks.

The understanding that changed my entire perspective I assumed about corporate productivity:

Effective accountability comes from clear commitments and reliable implementation, not from extensive records of meetings.

Perfect minutes of ineffective discussions is simply unproductive records – it can’t improve poor meetings into effective ones.

In contrast, I’ve encountered organisations with elaborate minute taking processes and terrible accountability because they mistook record keeping with results.

The benefit of a conference resides in the impact of the outcomes reached and the actions that emerge, not in the thoroughness of the documentation generated.

The real worth of each conference lies in the quality of the commitments established and the implementation that emerge, not in the comprehensiveness of the minutes created.

Prioritise your attention on enabling conditions for productive discussions, and the accountability will follow automatically.

Invest your energy in establishing optimal processes for excellent decision making, and suitable accountability will emerge automatically.

The fundamental truth about corporate minutes?

Documentation should support decisions, not become more important than decision making.

Documentation should support action, not dominate productive work.

The most successful conferences are the ones where all participants leaves with crystal clear knowledge of what was committed to, who is doing what, and when deliverables must to be completed.

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