The conversation you cannot hold in your head
Somebody is halfway through a sentence and says a date. You want to check whether they mean this month or next, but asking now would cut across the part you actually came for, so you hold the question and keep listening. Half a minute later you are holding the question, the date, and the growing awareness that you have stopped following what they are saying.
That is the whole problem, and it is a timing problem. Your attention was being asked for three things at once, and one of them was always going to give. The cost does not arrive at the end, when you sit down to write the thing up. It is paid during, in the parts you missed while you were busy keeping the parts you already had.
Three jobs, one channel
A conversation asks you to follow what is being said, to work out what you are going to say back, and to keep whatever you will need afterwards. The first two are the conversation. The third is a separate job that happens to run in the same place, and it runs by repetition: you say the figure to yourself again, you turn the question over so it does not slip, you keep a loose count of what you have agreed to. Every repetition happens while somebody else is still talking.
Which gives the thing an unpleasant shape. The more a conversation contains, the more of it you try to keep, and the more you try to keep the less you are hearing. You listen worst exactly when a conversation is at its densest, which is when it matters most.
There is a version of this in which the third job is simply not yours. Record it and the keeping stops being your problem: there is a transcript, a summary whose length answers to the conversation's own, and the commitments set out separately with a name against each. That is what Meeting Notes produces from any recording, an eight-minute call on the way to something else included.
The things you are holding at once
It is worth being specific about what is in your hands during an ordinary twenty minutes, because written out it stops looking like a memory task and starts looking like a workload.
- The thing you want to say next, held back because the other person has not finished.
- A figure or a date, repeated silently so that it survives the next two minutes.
- The question you are saving for the end, which will be asked badly or not at all.
- A running count of what you have agreed to, which nobody wrote down and both of you will later quote differently.
- Something from Tuesday that has just become relevant, arriving at the worst available moment.
None of these is hard on its own. Their cost is that they are concurrent, and that the thing they are concurrent with is the conversation. A person doing all five is not being inattentive. They are being extremely attentive, to the wrong five things, because the alternative is losing them.
The open loop is the expensive one
Of the five, the one that costs most is the question you are waiting to ask. It is expensive because it is time-locked: you are holding it until a particular moment, and until that moment comes it takes a slice of everything you hear. A figure can be recovered afterwards by asking for it again. A loop cannot, because when the conversation ends the moment to ask has gone with it.
It is also where a certain kind of decision comes from — the sort nobody quite made. The objection you were holding never found a gap, so silence stood in for agreement and the thing went ahead. A fortnight later somebody is unpicking a choice whose only support was that nobody found a place to speak.
| Where you are in the conversation | What is said | What you are carrying by then |
|---|---|---|
| The first two minutes | Two names you have not heard before, and the reason the project moved | Both names, phonetically, and a sense that the reason will matter |
| Around minute six | A figure, then a condition attached to the figure | The figure, and the knowledge that the condition was the important half |
| Just after that | Something that contradicts what you were told last week | All of the above, plus a question you are now saving for the end |
| Minute fourteen | The part you actually came for | All of the above, while trying to hear this |
| The last minute | Three next steps, quickly, because somebody is late for something else | Two of the three, and the question you never asked |
The same load, priced differently
All of that is true of everybody, and it is not true of everybody to the same degree. What it costs to hold an unwritten thing varies between people, and for one person it varies between a Tuesday and a Friday. It is not a fixed price, and a week in which it is cheap tells you nothing at all about a week in which it is not.
It is worth saying flatly what the software is. Ona records conversations and lets you search them. It is not a medical or therapeutic product, it does not diagnose, assess, treat or manage anything, and it makes no claim about the state of anybody's attention or memory. It is somewhere to put a conversation so that keeping it is not your job.
Where the load can actually go
The practical move is not to record more. It is to stop using your attention as the place things are kept, which needs somewhere else for them to go that you can reach without leaving the conversation. Hover is that: it opens over the document or the call you are already in and takes either a recording or a sentence you would sooner not go on holding. For the conversations that happen nowhere near a screen, the Ona RecordPen, a Bluetooth pen you put on the table, covers the same ground.
Either side of one conversation
- Ask the thing you are carrying, earlyIf you walk in already holding a question, put it in the first two minutes. Asked early it gets answered and then stops costing you anything. Held for twenty minutes, it is charged against all twenty.
- Say the number back once, out loudWhen a figure or a date arrives, repeat it — "the fourteenth, not the fourth" — and then stop rehearsing it. That does two things at once: it puts the number clearly into the recording, and it gives the other person a chance to correct you while they are still in front of you.
- Let the half-thought out of your headThe thing that has suddenly become relevant does not have to wait for a gap in the talking. Two seconds of saying it out loud into Hover and it is somewhere you will find it again, which was the only reason you were holding on to it.
- Decide what you owe before you do anything elseThree minutes at the end, while it is still warm. Not a write-up: a decision about which of the five things you were carrying are actually yours to act on. The rest stays in the transcript, where it was always going to be more accurate than in your account of it.
- Put the questions you swallowed to the recordSome of what you were holding was only ever a question for yourself. Those are the ones worth asking later, when there is nobody in front of you waiting for you to finish.
The question you get to ask afterwards
What changes a fortnight later is the direction the question travels. Instead of assembling an answer out of whatever you can still recall, you put it to the conversations themselves. Ask Ona reads across the ones you have recorded and marks each part of what it tells you with the conversation that part came out of, so the last step is a tap and a read instead of an act of faith.
The questions are the ones you were holding at the time. What was the condition attached to that figure. Did she say the fourteenth or the fourth. Which of us said we would do it. What made them expensive was never their difficulty. It was that the only copy was in your head, and you had to have been holding it.
Half of what I was doing in meetings was rehearsing. The date, the caveat, the thing I wanted to say the moment they stopped talking. I record the ones with detail in them now, and the odd part is that I am better in the room, not just afterwards.
Mira J., Service Designer, outdoor equipment retailer
The wider version of this
Almost none of what this describes is a meeting in any formal sense. It is a fifteen-minute call, a conversation at somebody's desk, an appointment where a person tells you four things quickly because there is somebody waiting after you. That half of a week — the plans, the quotes, the things nobody books a room for — is gathered at Ona for personal life and productivity.
Where the load stays yours
It does not make you remember better. Nothing here improves recall, nothing here is intended to, and nothing here is a treatment or an aid for anything. What it removes is a reason to lean on recall in the first place, which is a smaller and more honest claim. Your memory on Thursday is the same memory you had on Monday.
It can also become its own pile. Forty transcripts you have never opened is not a solved problem, it is a differently shaped one, and anybody for whom an unread backlog is its own kind of weight should know that before starting. Record less than you are tempted to, and close each one the same hour.
It does none of the deciding. Knowing precisely what was said tells you nothing about what to do about it, and the part that actually weighs — the choosing, the declining, the thing you have to go back to somebody about — is untouched. Better information does not make a decision lighter. Sometimes it makes it heavier, because the excuse of not being sure has gone.
And some conversations cost more to record than the record is worth. How people talk changes when talking is being kept; a friend telling you something difficult is not having the same conversation into a recorder, and neither are you. What is worth catching is a conversation where somebody is giving you detail in their professional capacity. Where the detail is the least important thing in the room, leave it alone.
If you try this for a fortnight
Only if you treat a recording as something to be processed. It is not a queue and there is nothing to work through. The three minutes at the end of a conversation are the whole of the work; the rest waits until a question turns up that needs it.
If you find yourself with an evening job you did not have before, you have started making notes of your notes. Stop doing that and the habit gets cheap again.
Almost never, and that is the expected outcome rather than a failure of the idea. Most transcripts are never opened at all.
The ones you open, you open because something specific came up: a figure in dispute, a date you cannot place, a promise somebody is holding you to. That is once or twice a month for most people, and those occasions are the whole return.
There are plenty, and the half of this that needs no software still works in them. Ask the question early instead of holding it. Say the number back out loud. Write one word per item as it arrives — a hook, not a note — and rebuild from the hooks within the hour.
You will lose more of it than you would have otherwise. You will lose much less of it than you would by trying to hold all of it at once.
Stop holding the next one
Take the next conversation that has a date, a figure or a condition in it, press record, and notice what you are still carrying an hour later.