Useless at taking meeting minutes...can anyone give me tips please?

[MyCatHatesEverybody]

I recently started a job where a small part of it involves taking meeting minutes and I'm crap at it. It's like my brain (let alone my handwriting) can't keep up with what's being said so by the time I've processed the info to write it down I've missed the next part of the conversation and so it snowballs. The meetings involve numbers and technical talk so I can't just jot down a general idea of what's being said, I need to write down specific figures and what they relate to. If I asked them to repeat stuff I'd be interrupting them literally every other sentence.

I've got away with it up till now because they've been on Zoom so I can play back the recording and write everything up at my leisure but we're back in the office now so they'll be face-to-face and unrecordable.

Help...I literally feel sick with anxiety about how to cope without looking useless at my job

Like @Lipsandlashes I’m a committee secretary. Lots of good advice on here too. I’d first ask the Chair what kind of minutes were required - for a board or committee meeting they might want very formal minutes, whereas for a team meeting it may just be light touch and actions. For me, the most important things to capture are:

• who is there
• who isn’t there
• is the meeting quorate
• any declarations of interest - V Important in my meetings
• what was decided/approved
• what was rejected/refused
• what are the actions and who are these allocated to.

Pretty much everything else is upholstery, most of the time. I minute a summary of the discussion, but only very briefly. I also minute whether there has been a difference of opinion or whether an approval was not unanimous. I send a draft of each agenda item to the item owner to sense check I have facts correct - especially in Finance committees. The speed of speech can be around 250 words per minute so it’s also important to accept that unless you take shorthand or are a stenographer, you will not capture everything. And not everything needs to be captured.

I've had to do it yrs ago and it's so hard. Really I think it's many for folk with training in short hand. I used to have to fill in for the office mgr/pa if she was on holiday and I struggled. She showed me her note book of shirt hand and I was like wtf is that 😂 it really is a skill.

Def ask for them to be audio recorded in future, no one shld have any objection so sure it'll be fine.

Open up Word and select the microphone and it transcribes everything that's said.