A few weeks ago I met a friend for coffee. She’s a project manager for a tech company and another friend had joined us.

We were doing what you do over coffee, talking about work, moaning about things and putting the world to rights, when she mentioned a meeting she’d had to minute.

It wasn’t normally her job, but she’d been asked to produce some high-level minutes.

“The meeting was only an hour,” she said. “It took me three hours to do the minutes.”

She genuinely thought she’d done something wrong.

Three hours to produce high-level minutes from a one-hour meeting sounded ridiculous to her. Maybe she’d taken too many notes. Maybe she’d included too much. Maybe she just wasn’t very good at it.

Then she asked me:

“How long would it have taken you?”

“Probably about three hours.”

She looked at me as if I’d completely missed the point.

“No, I mean if you knew what you were doing.”

That made us laugh.

But it was actually a really good question.

Because unless you’ve had to produce proper minutes yourself, it’s easy to assume that a one-hour meeting followed by three hours of writing means somebody is doing something inefficiently.

It doesn’t.

The meeting might last an hour. Making sense of it can take considerably longer.

She hadn’t spent three hours typing.

She’d spent three hours deciding what mattered.

And there’s a big difference.

A conversation can make perfect sense while you’re sitting in the room. People interrupt each other, go off on tangents, return to something discussed twenty minutes earlier and use names or acronyms everybody seems to understand.

Then you sit down afterwards and try to turn all of that into a concise, accurate record.

Suddenly the obvious isn’t quite so obvious.

Was that actually agreed?

Who took that action?

Did he say Tuesday or Thursday?

Was that important enough to include?

And what on earth were they talking about during those five minutes when everyone seemed to speak at once?

“But they only need to be high level”

That was part of what had thrown my friend.

She’d only been asked for high-level minutes. Surely that should make the job quick?

Not necessarily.

You can’t decide what to leave out until you’ve worked out what happened.

A twenty-minute discussion might eventually become two sentences in the finished minutes. Those two sentences aren’t necessarily twenty minutes of work. You still have to understand the discussion, identify the important part and make sure your two sentences don’t change its meaning.

Writing less can require more judgement, not less.

Some meetings are simply easier to minute

This is where the meeting itself makes an enormous difference.

Give me a clear agenda, decent audio and a chair who keeps the discussion under control, summarises decisions and confirms actions before moving on, and you’ve made the minute taker’s job considerably easier.

Now take the same hour and fill it with people talking over one another, conversations wandering between agenda items, poor microphones, unexplained acronyms and a chair who lets the discussion go wherever it wants.

Same one-hour meeting.

Very different afternoon afterwards.

Experience certainly helps. You become better at recognising what’s likely to matter while the meeting is happening. Your notes improve. You learn when you need detail and when you don’t.

But experience doesn’t magically turn a badly structured meeting into a well-structured one.

So was three hours too long?

No.

For that particular one-hour meeting, three hours to produce the finished minutes didn’t strike me as excessive at all.

Another meeting might have taken less. A difficult one could take considerably longer.

And that’s probably the useful lesson from our coffee.

Don’t estimate the work involved in producing minutes simply by looking at how long the meeting lasted.

The hour in the meeting is only part of the job.

My friend wasn’t slow.

She’d just discovered the bit nobody had told her about.