How to organise meeting notes
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Why filing does not work, what to mark instead, and why you should not try to sort the backlog.
Notes get lost for a reason that has nothing to do with how tidy you are. You file them in the moment, by the topic you had in mind then; a month later you come back with a different question and no recollection of the filing. Folders cannot fix that, because they demand the decision at the wrong time. What works is marking events rather than topics — a decision, a commitment, a disagreement — and being able to search everything you have said rather than the places you put it.
Why folders do not fix this
The advice on this subject is almost entirely about structure: a folder per client, a tag per project, a naming convention. It is not wrong so much as aimed at the wrong moment.
Filing happens when you know least. At the end of a meeting you know what it was about. You do not know that in five weeks the thing you need will be one sentence about a deadline, and that you will look for it under the name of a person who was barely mentioned.
The person searching is not the person who filed. They have a different question, a different vocabulary for the same subject, and none of the context that made the category obvious. Every filing scheme is a bet that those two people will think alike, and they do not.
This is why the third evening of reorganising always feels productive and changes nothing. The structure improves; the mismatch stays.
Mark events, not topics
The one habit that survives contact with reality is marking, and what you mark matters more than how.
Mark events. A decision. A commitment, with whose it is. A number. A disagreement you will need to come back to. These are what people look for afterwards, and an hour of conversation produces four or five of them.
Do not mark topics. The subject of a meeting is usually recoverable from its title and its participants. Marking it feels like organisation and adds nothing you did not already have.
The test is simple: if you can imagine yourself typing it into a search box in a month, it is worth a mark. If you can only imagine yourself browsing past it, it is not.
Search instead of structure
Here is the part that makes the rest workable. If you can search everything that was said, you need much less structure than you think.
Structure is a way of narrowing down where to look. Search over full text removes most of the need for it: you do not have to remember where a thing went if you can remember any phrase from it. And phrases are what people do remember — a price, an unusual word, the name of a competitor somebody mentioned once.
That is also why keeping the words matters more than keeping tidy titles. A title is your summary of a conversation, written before you knew what you would need. The transcript is what was actually said, and it is searchable on terms you have not thought of yet.
Structure keeps a small job: the handful of groupings that are given to you rather than invented — a client, a project with a deadline, a board that meets monthly. Those are worth a folder. Everything else is worth a search.
What the search does not cover
Worth being exact about, because the rest of this page leans on it.
Search covers what reached your Mac. What you recorded, what you dictated, and the documents built from them — the short notes you type during a meeting are not part of the search. A meeting a colleague invited you to inside your own workspace is searched along with yours. The rest of a team’s meetings, and meetings another organisation invited you to, open from their own lists and are not searched. If the thing you are looking for happened in a meeting you were never part of, no search of yours will find it.
This is a boundary of the approach, not an oversight in a product. Any system that searches everything you have said can only search what reached it.
What to do with two hundred notes you already have
The honest advice here is the opposite of what the situation seems to demand.
Do not sort the backlog. It is a project without an end, it gets abandoned partway, and half-sorted is worth about as much as unsorted. The impulse is strong precisely because the pile is the visible problem — but the pile is a symptom of the filing habit, and sorting it harder repeats the habit.
Mark the last month and change what happens next. A month is enough to cover what is still live, and small enough to finish in one sitting.
Leave the rest to search. Old notes are not useless because nobody organised them. They are useless only if their text is gone — and if the text is there, they are findable on terms you will invent later, which is more than any folder would have given you.
How this works without the discipline
Everything above works with paper, a plain text file and a habit. The habit is the expensive part: marking during a conversation requires you to remember to mark, in the moment when you are least free to.
What we make removes that requirement rather than helping you meet it. Speech is recognised on your Mac and the audio file is deleted once the text exists. The transcript syncs to our servers automatically, and after every meeting a third-party language model reads it to write the summary; documents are built the same way when you ask for one. Everything you say lands in one archive you can search: meetings, phone calls, conversations in the room, and what you dictate to a model. Marking a moment is one key rather than a decision about where it belongs. Every quote shows you where it was said — open it and the transcript opens at that place. More on this: if you already keep a second brain by hand, what it never receives.
The free plan covers recording, transcription and search, and asks for no card. What happens to the text afterwards is on privacy, and the mechanics are on how it works. For what to do during the meeting rather than after it, taking notes while you are the one talking is a separate problem with its own answers.
Questions
- Why do meeting notes get lost?
- Because they are filed by the person who was in the meeting and looked for by someone who has forgotten it. You put a note under the topic that was on your mind that afternoon; a month later you arrive with a different question, a different word for the same thing, and no idea where you put it. That is not untidiness, it is a mismatch between when the decision is made and when it is needed.
- Do I need folders for meeting notes?
- Far less than the advice suggests. Folders require you to decide the category at the moment of writing, which is the moment you know least about how you will search later. They work when the categories are fixed and given to you — a client per folder, a project per folder — and they fail when the thing you need is a decision that cut across four of them.
- What should I mark during a meeting?
- Events, not subjects. A decision, a commitment with a name attached, a number, a disagreement worth returning to. These are the things you look for afterwards, and there are only a handful per conversation. Marking the topic is what feels organised and what turns out to be useless: the topic is usually obvious from the meeting title anyway.
- How do I find something in old notes?
- Search for the words that were said rather than the label you gave them. People remember phrasings — a price, a name, an odd turn of speech — far better than they remember their own filing scheme. If what you have is only a set of titles and folders, that recollection has nothing to catch on, which is the practical argument for keeping the full text of what was said.
- What should I do if I already have hundreds of notes?
- Not sort them. Sorting a backlog is a project that gets abandoned on the third evening, and the beginning of it is no more useful than nothing. Mark the last month, change what you do going forward, and leave the rest to search. Old notes are not worthless because they are unsorted — they are only worthless if they are unsearchable.