How to take notes during a meeting you are also running

Taking notes in a meeting you are also running means splitting your attention between the conversation and the page, and the conversation has to win. This guide is for freelancers and consultants who run their own client calls on Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, with nobody else to take notes. It covers what to write and what to skip, a marker shorthand, screen set-up, phrases that buy writing time, the ten minutes after the call, and when a recording or an AI notetaker earns its place. For calls on an ordinary phone line, see taking notes during a phone call.

Can you take good notes while running a meeting?

Yes, if you stop trying to write sentences. Capture a small number of things as markers during the call, and do the writing in the ten minutes afterwards. A note-taker who keeps a running account of the meeting misses the next question, and the person running the call cannot afford that.

A useful rule: if you have been typing for more than ten seconds, you have stopped listening.

What should you write down, and what can you skip?

Write down what you could not reconstruct later; skip what you could. The split is not about importance.

Write down	Skip
Decisions, as they were stated	What you said yourself; you will remember it
Actions: who, what, by when	Explanations and background you already know
Figures, dates, names and versions, exactly	Agreement: "sounds good", "makes sense"
The client's own words for a requirement	Anything already in a shared document or on screen
Open questions, and who will answer them	The order the conversation happened in
Anything that surprised you	Small talk and the first two minutes

You can rebuild an explanation from memory. You cannot rebuild whether the client said five retries or three, or whether "the dashboard" was in the first release or the second.

What shorthand works for meeting notes?

One character at the start of each line, so the lines that matter can be found in seconds after the call. Write people as initials.

D   decision          D hosted search for ph1 (P ok)
A   action            A T creds Thu
Q   open question     Q who signs off design? P to find out
#   exact figure      # retries 5 not 3
"   their words       " refunds same day in the dashboard
!   risk or surprise  ! their IT blocking staging since the 9th
?   I missed this     ? T audit date, 10:14

The ? line with a time is the one that saves you. When you lose the thread while speaking, write a question mark and the clock time, keep going, and ask before the end or check the recording if there is one.

Use the same markers for every client and every meeting. Shorthand only works if you can read it a week later.

How should you set up your screen?

The call on one side, your notes on the other, and the notes never on the screen you share.

• Prepare the file before the call, with the date, attendees and agenda headings already in it. During the call you fill gaps rather than building structure. How to write meeting minutes has the skeleton.
• Share one window, not your whole screen. Google Meet offers a tab, a window or your entire screen (Google's help page), and Teams a window or your whole screen (Microsoft's help page). A whole-screen share shows your notes, your inbox, and sometimes another client's name in a tab title; keeping client notes separate covers that failure.
• Turn notifications off for the length of the call.
• On one screen, keep the notes in a narrow window beside the call rather than switching between them. Every switch is a moment you are not looking at anyone.

How do you keep the conversation going while you write?

Say what you are writing. It sounds odd and works: the other person hears their point confirmed, and you get the seconds you need to type it.

Moment	What to say
A decision	"Let me write that down: hosted search for phase one."
An action	"So that's Tom, credentials, by Thursday?"
A figure	"Five retries, not three. Got it."
You fell behind	"Give me a second to catch that."
The end of a topic	"Before we move on, the short version is…"
Five minutes before the end	"Let me read back the actions I have."

Summarising at the end of each topic does two jobs at once: it gives you the line for the minutes, and it catches a misunderstanding while everyone is still in the call.

Two more habits help. Ask people to paste exact figures, links and names into the meeting chat rather than reading them out. And on a large call, ask someone else to take the notes for that meeting, agreed before it starts rather than in the first minute.

Should you record the meeting instead of taking notes?

Record when exact wording will matter and everyone has agreed, and keep taking markers either way. A recording is a record, not notes: nobody watches an hour of video to find one decision, and a transcript without markers is a long document with the important lines somewhere inside it.

Approach	Good for	Weak at
Notes only	Routine calls and a quick write-up	Exact figures, quotes, anything missed while talking
Recording only	Checking what was said	Being read; the minutes still have to be written
Notes plus recording or transcript	Requirements, scope changes, anything disputed	Needs agreement, and storage you have to look after

Recording a client call needs the agreement of the people in it, and the rules differ by country and by contract, so check yours. Telling clients you use an AI notetaker has wording for the invitation and the first call. The platforms' own transcripts are covered in transcribing a Google Meet call and Teams meeting transcripts.

Live captions sit in between. Google Meet (Turn on captions) and Microsoft Teams (live captions) can show them during the call, which helps you catch a misheard figure. They are a reading aid, not a record: Microsoft says Teams does not save captions.

What should you do in the ten minutes after the call?

Turn the markers into minutes before your next meeting starts. Ten minutes now is worth an hour on Friday.

1. Fill every ? line, from memory, from the recording, or with a quick message to the person.
2. Turn A lines into action items with an owner and a real date; how to write action items has the shape.
3. Turn D lines into decisions, and copy any that matter into a decision log.
4. Send the recap; the follow-up email guide has templates.

Put those ten minutes in the calendar, attached to every client call. Otherwise the next call takes them.

How does TrackHeros fit into taking notes?

TrackHeros takes the recording and the first draft off your hands. Its bot joins Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls as a visible participant, records them, and makes the transcript in two passes: the platform's captions first, for speaker names, then the recording's audio for the text. The summary lists decisions and action items with owners and dates.

That leaves you the markers that need judgement: the ! risk you noticed, the thing you want to raise privately, the requirement you want to quote back next week. Afterwards the assistant answers from that client's meetings only, with citations to who said it and when. More on Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.