Show HN: I built a system for active note-taking in regular meetings like 1-1s
withdocket.com168 points by davnicwil 2 days ago
168 points by davnicwil 2 days ago
Hey HN! Like most here regular meetings have always been a big part of my work.
Over the years I've learned the value of active note taking in these meetings. Meaning: not minutes, not transcriptions or AI summaries, but me using my brain to actively pull out the key points in short form bullet-like notes, as the meeting is going on, as I'm talking and listening (and probably typing with one hand). This could be agenda points to cover, any interesting sidebars raised, insights gotten to in a discussion, actions agreed to (and a way to track whether they got done next time!).
It's both useful just to track what's going on in all these different meetings week to week (at one point I was doing about a dozen 1-1s per week, and it just becomes impossible to hold it in RAM) but also really valuable over time when you can look back and see the full history of a particular meeting, what was discussed when, how themes and structure are changing, is the meetings effective, etc.
Anyway, I've tried a bunch of different tools for taking these notes over the years. All the obvious ones you've probably used too. And I've always just been not quite satisfied with the experience. They work, obviously (it's just text based notes at the end of the day) but nothing is first-class for this usecase.
So, I decided to build the tool I've always felt I want to use, specifically for regular 1-1s and other types of regular meetings. I've been using it myself and with friends for a while already now, and I think it's got to that point where I actually prefer to reach for it over other general purpose note taking tools now, and I want to share it more widely.
There's a free tier so you can use it right away, in fact without even signing up.
If you've also been wanting a better system to manage your notes for regular meetings, give it a go and let me know what you think!
This is personal. However, many of the people I had meetings with love this. So, here we go. Quite a while back, I realized that anything digital, from phones to computers, tends to become or look like very official/non-personal and hence looks bad, especially in 1:1 meetings. I decided to go with pen and paper, in a simple Notebook (A5 or A7 is my choice). I’m do not write anything personal, but the points shared or noted down between us are enough to remind me of any points that I might have noted in my mind. I’ve carried this habit to many other meetings (non-1:1s too), even when there is a note-taker (AI or otherwise). My meeting notes usually get shared or used as references by other participants. Even during the meetings, other participant(s) sometimes contribute to my notes. I don’t hate digital mediums; in fact, I have used Freeform on an iPad just like I use my Notebook for meeting notes. The interesting part is that I learnt to draw like Dan Roam[1] quite a while back. So, my notes contain texts with a lot of arrows, stick figures, shapes, etc. Sidenote: A lot of conversations got sidetracked to discussions about paper, fountain pens, the way I write, etc. I like pen and paper for meetings because I can take notes while asserting dominance through constant eye contact. I can touch type, but I need to be looking at the screen to achieve the same level of accuracy with which I can blindly write. Tangential: I also recently switched to paper without lines after 20 years, and it's been quite liberating. Fortunately, I was trained/forced to write on plain blank papers in school. So, I can pretty much course-correct my invisible lines. However, when I have a choice, I’ve decided to stick to dotted grids. what you see as "asserting dominance" i show as "giving respect" are these the same things or are we reaching differently w/ the consideration I share the same sentiment. Not sure if it’s productive to see one on ones as a game of domination. In my experience empowered coworkers make a better team and are a better deal for the company. Maybe it was a humorous remark lost to the absence of tone in the written medium. I thought he was being sarcastic with that part. I did chuckle for a moment. gosh dangit, it's easy to re-read with that in mind whoosh right past me head > My meeting notes usually get shared or used as references by other participants. How are you transcribing, or are you sharing photos? Hmmm! How many meetings do you do in a week? Unless, you are building a Meetings App or your company is about Meetings, I'd suggest reducing the Meetings enough that you don't have to Transcribe everything. My meeting notes are, well, like comic books; quite a lot more drawings. So, people usually take pictures or I just take pictures and email them. For instance, I was once in a meeting at a company planning the product roadmap for the next 3-5 years. I did a timeline-of-sort note with circles (inspired by DaisyDisk), complete with a few different colors. That note became the "official" starting base for the plan, shared across the company and referenced by the team. If you are a manager and having 1-1s the very use case he called out, you may have 1-1s with 15+ people every two weeks. I am a staff consultant. I am constantly in meetings with customers, sales, my management for high profile clients, people working on projects I’m leading, internal strategy go to market meetings. I LOVE this, exactly what I’ve been looking for. Here’s the issue - all my meetings have confidential, sensitive info. I can’t use a version you host (or well, I could, but you won’t be willing to do the 6 month security review I need). Can you give me a version I can host (or run locally) and I give you some $ one time or per year? yes, absolutely. I've been thinking about this too, I did plan to offer self hosted if there's demand and have built it with that in mind. My email is davnicwil at gmail, please email me and let's talk about it! Same here: no self-host, no way. Best would be a one-time payment option. thank you. I will definitely offer this. Please email me (davnicwil at gmail) just to connect and I'll update you when self host is available. Love it, great idea. My humble advice: you’re on the top of HN right now—make it completely free. Overnight you could get some serious adoption (strike while the iron is hot!) Then build a few more features that people won’t be able to live without and THAT can be your paid tier. Good shout. I'm going to give everyone who signs up today full access to everything and access to those features will be grandfathered in to any future plans. The plans as you see them now are just rough shape anyway just to launch something! -- UPDATE alright that should be implemented now, and all existing signups ported (if I got everyone :-) Everyone is now on the 'Business' plan (full access to everything) on signup This is awesome. Thank you! Going to try this. Is there a plan to develop mobile app? Thanks for sharing it! What are the advantages of using the tool instead opening a simple google docs? I've put this in more words on the about page [0] but in my mind it all about the structure being first class for the regular meeting note use case, rather than a general document. That means - meetings notes are structured as entries, new entry in 1 click, with a template, with responsive structure - easy to see who wrote what, everyone gets their own section - first class action tracking and management of actions in one place - distraction-free editor optimised for one-hand typing with only minimal formatting necessary to make notes tidy - easier to search and navigate through history of notes I think this applies for google docs but also other 'general' note taking tools and editors. This reads a lot like a feature list to me. I don't understand the benefit from entries versus just an h1 tag. You can even collapse those down, and then docs will write you an index. Might be helpful to focus on the value prop more. It looks cool, but as a recovering GTD junkie, it looks more like a distraction than a core part of my everyday work. I just realised I never dropped the link in above (doh) but I think my about page [0] does a much better job explaining than I can reproduce here. But to get directly to your point, I just think entries give better structure than a sort of 'open doc' self-regulated-formatting type system with headers etc. You get an 'entity' that can be tagged with date&time, searched, displayed in a cluster of sections with responsive layout, etc. That's actually one of the precise things I'm trying to improve upon from my own experience with using general note taking tools for meeting notes. But I concede it could just be subjective opinion. This might be a stretch but if you are at all up for it I would absolutely love to quiz you further on this though on a call or via email. I may have misunderstood. davnicwil at gmail, if you'd be up for it :-) I'd say the most important part is to have a low-friction tool that fits within an individual's workflow. I like their tool, but i do agree on my side that a Notion with collapsible toggles works better for me, right now (alongside a nice cmd+k to teleport to the right pages) As a former GTD Junkie and recovering productivity-a-halic myself, what did you settle on and how do GTD or not-do GTD today? Already exists better to free and see the other one
https://www.notetimeapp.com/diaries Not sure if its better, but it is free and it works for me. Thank you for sharing! As much as people like to criticize Microsoft Teams, it actually offers a feature called Facilitator [1][2][3] that, to my knowledge, works very well. I say this based on both my own experience and feedback from friends who use it in their day-to-day work. That said, I, of course, always welcome competition. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMoGOWOBicY [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/facilitator-in-mi... The very first sentence in the "about" page has a typo (extra "and": ... meetings, and you <and> want to...): You're in a ton of regular meetings, and you and want to take notes and actions to keep track of what's going on in them week to week. oh man, I thought I'd caught all these. Thank you! Fixed! There's another : That was me, in meetings for years. So I decided to build Docket to be my tool. It could yours too. Missing "be". Plus here is another vote for self hosted cheers, also fixed! Writer's blindness is real! My email is davnicwil at gmail, if you email me just so I have yours I'll update you when self hosted is available Wait, do I overlook something or is it just a shareable text file? essentially, yes! It's deliberately very focused and simple, but you also have - actions (checkboxes) with mentions that you can track in one place - images - templates and one-click new entry On the shared thing, it's opinionated in that it's not a shared single document like a google doc, rather everyone you share with gets their own section, so you can very easily see who wrote what. Lets say I have some private and silly questions that I need to take a note of & check first or I'm venting some frustration(hey that's what happens in meetings sometimes) in the notes, what do I do ? May be add a small section for private notes ? That's a great idea. For now, you could temporarily turn off wifi and rant away ;-) Well to address the elephant in the room. There is no world that I wouldn’t or shouldn’t be automatically fired for putting notes between myself and my employer in a none approved website I found on the web. It won't be today but my goal is to earn a place on your org's approved list one day and win you as a customer :-) Relatedly, I've had a few requests for a self hosted version already and will be offering this very soon as a priority. If that'd solve the issue also, please email me at davnicwil at gmail and I will update you when it's available. I hate to be mean. But you never will earn a place as a one man unknown developer to be an offering at my company and be a place where we put all of our information for both confidentially reasons and we wouldn’t trust the long term viability of your company. We already use Lattice for performance notes, peer to peer feedback and it’s a place where we put notes for our 1:1s. It integrates with Slack to remind us to enter topics before the meeting, etc. Even with all of those objections, you won’t get anywhere in corporate America with your product unless you offer SSO. It’s not that hard to do. I have recommended a one man SaaS once in my career to something that was critical to what I needed for a large company critical initiative. But we got lawyers involved and negotiated our own instance and the code be put in escrow with a third party that we would get access to under certain circumstances. We were going to be 70% of his post sign in revenue and growing. Yeah, so there's no way to make a new company? Unless you're directly bought by Atlassian because they are "known enough"? I don't know Lattice so I would not use it. Offering a selfhosted or local version would probably help alleviate those concerns. I'll be doing this as a priority. I wanted to check there was concrete demand for it first, but I've now had enough requests that I'll be doing it. If anyone wants to be updated when this is available, email me at davnicwil at gmail YC has funded 5000 companies. from a quick Google search and only 20 have gone public and 3 of those have gone out of business https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-... So yes, if you want to start a business your most likely outcome is going to be complete failure. Your second most likely outcome is muddling along in obscurity until you give up realizing you could make more money being an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank and not work as hard. The next outcome is you might get acquired. Unless you are decision maker for a medium to large company, you shouldn’t have heard of Lattice. But don’t you think before someone invest time in building something they hope to be successful they look at the landscape of others in their vertical? There is a way: you have to make something that's better in a meaningful way, so that companies' management would want to SWITCH to it. And your new shiny thing also has to be compatible with all of the integrations, the ecosystem etc. that the current thing has. I'm not even mentioning trust issues, when sensitive data is involved. Doing anything less and hoping that companies would use your toy project is just wishful thinking. Sorry to be that guy, but please get real. That may be true for enterprise customers but there's still a big market of midsize companies without such stringent vendor requirements. Even a midsize company wants SSO (which is $7 a seat through Microsoft) and don’t want to have to worry about onboard and off board users individually to every SaaS product they use Any midsize company that would trust having their proprietary information like would be in one on ones would be a complete idiot to depend on a random website. One on ones usually feed into reviews. What guarantees would their be that the site would be up in a year? Interesting theory. IRL: I could add whatever I wanted into my computer at most places I've worked, including multi-billion$ international companies. Can you put your company’s proprietary information on any website? Sure I can put anything on my work computer. If your company wouldn’t mind you putting details of your 1 on 1s on his website, do you mind just emailing me those notes? Yes it would be kind of crazy to do that wouldn’t it? Enterprise shouldn't be the bar for caring where you store your data. Just putting data anywhere needs to end. Would you be okay with your doctor putting his notes on you in the website? Would you be okay with your accountant putting all of your financial data here? On the contrary, I do appreciate the blunt reminder of the challenges. I'm just launching and there's some path ahead to get to the place where larger orgs could use Docket, but as I say it's my goal to get there. That's a you-problem, not a general defect. And I say that from a similar situation: I can't bring ANY executable onto my computer without corporate IT approval. Even as an untouched file. But that isn't common in most companies. You think that most companies are going to allow their proprietary information to be put on random website? That’s different than running something on your local computer. If you think they wouldn’t mind, post your quarterly goals you discussed with your manager as a reply. If you aren’t willing to do that, why are you willing to put your information in his website? You do realise the internet vastly surpasses the reach of corporate america. There are another 7.5 billion people out there that aren't American that would possibly use this. You don't need American users to be a big company. If it is a good idea, it is a good idea. The submission in question is targeting corporate America. But that take is cliched founder take. “X is a $10 billion industry. If we just get 1% we will be a great investment”. If someone doesn’t more narrowly target their market to something more realistic than the entire population in the world. They have already lost I see absolutely zero mention of corporate America or any nation. It just states a way to improve meetings. There are many people that don't have regular meetings so I'm guessing he is focusing on those that do which is a market. I wouldn't use it as personally I prefer to avoid the meetings. It’s in the very title of the submission that its purpose is to improve note taking during 1 on 1s and he mentions that he is in plenty. Where else do you have 1 on 1s except at work? How often do you have meetings except at work? Corporate, yes. But why do you think the OP is specifically targeting America? You think a business in any other country - especially the EU where data protection requirements are even more strict - are going to allow their proprietary information to be in a random website?
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