Three words
Most of us were taught to write everything down. In school it worked. A teacher spoke, we copied, and the copy was proof that we had been there.
In a meeting it works less well. The person who writes fastest is the person who listens least. Your hands are in the last sentence while the room has already moved on to the next one.
Try something smaller. When a moment matters, write three words. Not a sentence. Not a summary. Just enough to mark the place.
"Launch date?" is three words. It holds almost nothing. And yet it holds the exact spot where a question was asked and the whole room turned toward it.
That is all a mark needs to do. It does not carry the moment. It points to it. The moment itself lives somewhere else, in the memory of the people who were there, and you can go back for it.
This takes a kind of trust. You have to believe the moment will still be there when you return. Most of us do not, because we have been burned by thin notes that meant nothing a week later. So we write more, to be safe, and we hear less.
But the notes were never the point. A note is a way of getting to a decision, and a decision is a short thing. It fits in a sentence. Someone will do something by a certain day, and here is why.
When you listen with your whole attention, you notice the turn. It is the sentence where the room shifts from maybe to yes. You will not catch it if you are copying the sentence before it.
There is also a small courtesy in it. When you look up, the person speaking can see that you heard them. Eyes on a screen read as someone elsewhere. Eyes on the speaker read as someone here.
So write three words, and look up. Let the conversation have you. The pause before a decision is the part most worth being present for.
Afterwards, the three words become a doorway. You read them and the room comes back. The voices, the hesitation, the reason it went the way it did.
What you take out of it is not a page of notes. It is the decision, and the sentence that carried it. That was always the part you needed.