In pursuit of the paperless meeting

Computerworld - Don't look now, but many businesses don't use paper anymore. In most companies, information that once was created on a typewriter and filed away in file folders is now created, communicated and stored electronically.

Yet some businesses and their employees still use pens and paper, particularly for taking notes in meetings. Why do we capture crucial business information on a data storage medium invented 2,000 years ago? Pen-and-paper meeting notes represent a nontrivial exception to the rapid and profitable advancement in the application of computer systems to improve every aspect of business processes.

I believe there are three reasons why some people still capture meeting notes on paper:

1. It's a cultural habit. Behavior in meetings is governed by corporate and national culture, from how we exchange business cards to how we talk to what we wear. Pulling out a nice pen and taking notes on paper is part of that cultural habit.
2. The company doesn't care. The transition from paper to digital bits and bytes was all about bringing measurable improvements to business processes and the bottom line. Note-taking is all about personal effectiveness, not the company's. So when it comes to note-taking technology, you're on your own. Few companies are likely to build electronic note-taking into the IT budget.
3. Every aspect of our "meetings culture" is broken, obsolete, inefficient and costly. We work hard at our desks but tend to view meetings as long coffee breaks where we can zone out, indulge the impulse to show off or play politics. Conversation tends to meander, rarely concluding with clear action items and completion deadlines. Letting all the decisions, ideas and information from meetings get lost on individual paper notepads is part of what makes meetings so time-inefficient and cost-ineffective.

So what can you do about it?

Some people lug their laptops into meetings and peck out notes on it. However, that creates what feels like a breach of etiquette. Placing a wall (the laptop screen) between you and others in the meeting is rude, the tapping on the keys is annoying, and the fact that you're looking at your screen rather than paying attention can be suspicious.

You could buy a tablet PC, but that's an expensive form of overkill for simple note-taking. You could scan, then process, your paper notes with optical character-recognition software. But that's more trouble than it's worth.

In a perfect world, you would take notes with a pen, just as you do now, but have those notes magically captured as machine-readable text.

The good news is that you can buy gadgets that get you pretty close to this perfect world. Here are the best of the lot.