Why I Can't Remember ANYTHING From Meetings As A Developer?

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all right it's the last day of the year last day of 2024 let's go um I'm on my way to CrossFit so I'm borderline not awake yet um but we got a topic I'm going to go to Reddit today I had people join the live stream last night from code commute uh and live stream is on my Dev leader YouTube channel so it was awesome to see people drop in so thanks for doing that if you're curious it's every Monday it's 700 p.m. Pacific very much like these conversations but uh we go to the chat we take questions and all that kind of stuff so um it's it's Unique for that reason but it's a lot of fun for me so great to see people from code Comm you jumping over to that um but the topic from today is going to be about uh

I think this is a pretty common thing actually but um it's going to be about uh I did a topic yesterday on meetings this one's going to be about is it common to forget things that were discussed in meetings and uh I wanted to chat through that and clearly someone's thinking about it if they're posting it on Reddit and asking about it so probably worth going through uh but a quick reminder if you want questions answered leave them in the comments if you have something that is uh something you want to keep Anonymous go send a message to Dev leader on any social media platform you want uh and I'll keep it Anonymous and then you can write more detail okay so is is it common uh I would say this is going to be highly dependent on the person right um a typ difficult

answer in software engineering is it depends uh but I think even for myself I can say um this is a common thing but there's different sorts of things that uh depending on the meeting my my understanding of the domain and I guess like the format of the meeting that I am better at retaining and or forgetting so there's that to consider but um I think one thing that I want to kind of talk through is like how people are going into meetings how prepared they are and um and I guess like what tools they're using right so um first things first I guess when going into meetings I would say like try to have some amount of preparation right this can look different because if you're not the one organizing the meeting maybe there aren't like uh you know pre-read notes or anything but like

try to make sure that if you're about to go into a call or you're like going into a meeting like understand what the context is there's literally people like shy away from this but there's literally nothing wrong with um reaching out to the meeting organizer if you're not even sure what the meeting is going to be about um just reaching out to them and saying hey like can you give more context for this meeting um cuz if you're getting invited to something and you're like man I don't even know why I'm included on this it's a waste of my time like ask right like if maybe the person's like Oh I thought you knew about thing X and you're like nope I don't and they're like cool don't show up to this we'll get we'll get Billy from the team to show up um just

reach out and you know double check with people especially if the the invite itself doesn't have a lot of context um but I think that's kind of step one maybe it sounds obvious to some people but if you're honest with yourself how often are you doing it um you know as I'm saying this I'm certain I could do a better job uh there sometimes I'm invited to things and I maybe trust you know I like to trust that people invite me for a good reason but if I'm strap for time like I should be asking that number one and then number two because this is about preparedness like what's going to what's going to help me retain more information well if I'm not trying to figure out why I'm there in the first place uh that will give me some more opportunity to use my

brain for remembering important stuff okay so preparedness is one thing uh this also kind of feeds into the domain knowledge because uh if you're unfamiliar with a particular domain I want to give you an example um yesterday we had a design review uh with one of the principal Engineers on the team did great work uh other principal Engineers on the team that have been on the team for you know significantly longer than I have it's been less than a year for me still coming up on a year though and um there are are topics in the design dock that are being discussed and we're kind of going through it and answering questions together um there are topics in the design doc that like I actually don't understand yet okay so in a in a meeting like that in terms of how much I'm going to

remember um about what's being discussed some parts are really going to stick out to me and other parts are going to be more like I can walk away from that meeting understand ing some more of the the really basic stuff so like a lot of my mental capacity gets steered towards some of that like I can leave being like hey I feel educated about some of the basic things and maybe there's a couple of nuances or details or uh timelines or you know meetings and stuff they had to follow up with where I'm like okay I'll remember that but there might be details that came up in there and purely because my lack of domain understanding I'm not just going to automatically remember them in fact there'll be things that like I won't get the details of them but they'll help me at in the

moment understand some of the more primitive parts of it so uh certainly I would say that kind of thing happens to me a lot and it's driven by how much domain knowledge and expertise I have so um I I don't know like the psychology behind it I'm not going to like pretend like I do but my guess is that I have more mental capacity to understand and focus on the context of the meeting if I understand the domain and if I'm still learning the domain then there's a lot of uh mental capacity put towards just like you know trying to pick up on the basics that's how I like to think about it um again not a psychologist so I don't know if that's true but that's the the rational I have so that's kind of like domain knowledge preparedness going into it is a

factor that can of course influence that um car is beeping my wife is in the vehicle in front of me when we drive to CrossFit uh her her work is significantly closer to CrossFit than home so we drive separately because I have to head back the complete opposite direction and she can just go to work it's kind of kind of wasteful but this guy's cutting me off now my wife's way ahead of me it's totally uncool we can fix that though okay um so the next thing I want to talk about is uh I guess like how much you're focusing on the meeting which maybe is like kind of tied to the first point but if we're being honest with ourselves here I think that there's probably a bunch of meetings that we've sat in where we're like especially with remote work um you're like

I'm tuned out but it doesn't just happen with remote work it can happen in person when you're bringing laptops and stuff to meetings but truly like be honest with yourself you don't have to like publish it online or whatever but can can you think about in the past s days in the past week can you think about a meeting that you were in where you were like I don't really know exactly why I'm here how I'm adding value and I'm going to be like multitasking and doing other stuff I would wager probably almost every single person listening to this as long as you weren't just like on vacation so if you were working over the past 7 days for a majority of those days like do you do you think that you probably were in a meeting where you were multitasking and doing something else

um cuz I would say especially in context like that in terms of remembering things probably very little right and it kind of goes back to the first point like why are you there I get someone invited you but like honestly like why why are you there there's nothing like people have this thing where they're like oh I got invited I guess I have to no like have a conversation about it you know like someone invited you cuz they wanted you to be included it doesn't necessarily mean like that's how it needs to be um so so yeah if you're tuned out in meetings you're you're going to recall less um which is a very brief point that I wanted to make before briding into this next part which is um kind of like I wanted to talk about like tools that you bring to meetings

one of them is of course a laptop this is a common thing um I've had different experiences with this throughout my career um I know like before Microsoft I used to go into me meetings and there'd be people that bring laptops and they just work during the meetings and I don't like I'm not going to dictate to other people how they can make the most effective use of their time in a meeting but I would say kind of like my earlier point if you find you're in a meeting and you're just distracted doing other things your value in the meeting is probably very low and it's not not an insult it's just I think like a it it's probably much lower than if you were tuned into the meeting it doesn't necessarily mean that you need to be tuned in maybe just don't need to

be there now some people will say like well I take notes on my laptop okay that's fine like I'm not saying no laptops so don't don't misinterpret my point um my point is that if you have a tool like a laptop and then you're using it for not taking notes or not uh you know in the meeting someone's uh making points about something you're like oh like I'll check that for us in the conversation so we have more data points like if you're not using the tool to help with the meeting and then you have this dual air quotes that's just enabling you to do other stuff again like it's not that that's wrong I'm not telling you how to be an adult but if you're if you're like hm I I don't know why I'm not retaining a lot for meetings like maybe that's

why right you're misusing a tool um it's kind of funny like uh cuz the next tool I want to talk about it's a pretty low tech one but just a notebook um so I go personally I go in between bringing a paper notebook and nothing and this Depends for me um on I guess I don't have it down to like a science uh I'd love to say I do I'm still like getting these coughs out of nowhere where I'll be talking and I'm like there's something in my throat like I can't breathe it's very bizarre cuz I've been over my cold for a little while now um this car's really got to pick up the pace it's very dangerous they're going below the speed limit in the left lane and then people are forced to like maneuver around them because they're going below the speed

limit um but so I go below sorry I go below I go between um notebooks and nothing for meetings and the reason I go between the two is if I have a notebook it's because I'm I'm preparing myself to take followup actions if I need to take where I'm like going into something thinking there's going to be a lot of followup action and I need to make sure that I'm the one responsible for that I bring a notebook um I find personally if I have a laptop it's I don't know it's a heavy-handed tool for the task uh I also find that when I take notes on a laptop um I don't I don't do well with digital notes it's kind of weird I wish I did it almost makes no sense to me that like someone whose life is entirely digital I like don't

do well with digital notes but I don't so very much a a notebook kind of person but the other situation for me is like if I just want to be fully engaged in the conversation I bring nothing not even a notebook and that's because my expectation is I will be sitting there not even not even trying to think about what notes I should take and more about just like literally focus on the conversation itself so um I go between the two it's kind I've had people uh I actually had someone recently kind of call it out and they said oh like you didn't like you you didn't bring your laptop or you didn't bring whatever and I'm like no uh just kind of how kind of how I work right um now there literally have been situations where I've been burned by having this mental

model of like I'm I'm going to you know not bring my notebook I'm just going to tune in uh and be part of the conversation and then someone says something that I wasn't expecting and I go oh man like it's almost like my brain isn't ready for for like it's not primed for remembering that and then I'm like I I don't have a tool for this right like I need my notebook or else I'm going to forget this and um then like I'll I'll pull my phone out of my pocket or something and I'm like sorry I'm not texting I I literally need to record this so um back to my earlier point for me I probably should just make sure I have my my low Tech notebook with me at all times and then I don't have to to worry about that I can

just kind of like you know focus on the conversation only if that's the the mode I need to be in but uh yeah I I should probably just bring my notebook so all of that to say that like I think that um you know we have different tools we have different ways of approaching meetings and if you're if you're like me and you basically you know you know likely will forget a lot of the details in a meeting then like kind of change your approach change your tools right clearly I think if someone's willing to ask this question online they're kind of acknowledging like whatever I'm doing is not working cool so like we got to change it uh those are some of the variables that I would recommend playing with um and like I said some of them include like maybe don't go to

the meeting if it's not relevant right um it's going to be way more difficult to remember things from a meeting if you're like tuned out from it uh I think you know for me I had to find the right tool for note taking I think that's very important happens to be a pen and a notebook that's what does it for me uh I I'm curious though um I wonder if there's like this opportunity even with a and this is kind of a maybe kind of a moot point for remote meetings but is there space beside this person yeah okay we'll do it um for remote meetings um like I work at Microsoft so having having co-pilot in the meeting is like ridiculously good for for meeting notes um I need to use this more so I think as I was talking through a lot of

this I was still picturing myself going to physical meetings um to be honest so I should have kind of touched on this a little bit more with remote meetings but um with remote meetings I'm obviously on my laptop already but I get flustered if I need to take a note and I like want to go type the note it's almost like too weird for me so I do approach it the same way like even though I'm on my laptop I'll have a physical book with me like I keep it on my desk um so I'll go you know take notes that way but what I wanted to say was with co-pilot um kind of less applicable for an an in-person meeting but maybe there's um some intelligent ways or creative ways to use that but I think uh I need to leverage co-pilot a lot

more for for my online meetings because I've had situations where I was talking with someone after and we were like wait a second like we talked about this recently like what when we both couldn't remember the outcome and we said wait though like we talked about it in that meeting like let's go back and we asked co-pilot and we said like in this meeting what was the outcome like what of this decision that was talked about and it actually gave us the timestamp where the person was talking about it we were like oh hell yeah like that is the future um but like being able to use tools like that um like I am not well practiced at that and I think that's a huge opportunity it's not a co-pilot advertisement literally no one pays me to talk about co-pilot but um I'm being genuine

because I've uh I have had it work really well for that reason um and I think that it's one of those things like if I don't practice using it then I'm not going to be aware of all the the benefits that it could add so um I have personally some work to do on that but those are my thoughts on not forgetting everything in a meeting so hope that's helpful uh yeah we'll do another one on the way back from Crossfit take care