This is personal. However, many of the people I had meetings with love this. So, here we go.
Quite a while back, I realized that anything digital, from phones to computers, tends to become or look like very official/non-personal and hence looks bad, especially in 1:1 meetings. I decided to go with pen and paper, in a simple Notebook (A5 or A7 is my choice). I’m do not write anything personal, but the points shared or noted down between us are enough to remind me of any points that I might have noted in my mind.
I’ve carried this habit to many other meetings (non-1:1s too), even when there is a note-taker (AI or otherwise). My meeting notes usually get shared or used as references by other participants.
Even during the meetings, other participant(s) sometimes contribute to my notes. I don’t hate digital mediums; in fact, I have used Freeform on an iPad just like I use my Notebook for meeting notes.
The interesting part is that I learnt to draw like Dan Roam[1] quite a while back. So, my notes contain texts with a lot of arrows, stick figures, shapes, etc.
Sidenote: A lot of conversations got sidetracked to discussions about paper, fountain pens, the way I write, etc.
I like pen and paper for meetings because I can take notes while asserting dominance through constant eye contact. I can touch type, but I need to be looking at the screen to achieve the same level of accuracy with which I can blindly write.
Tangential: I also recently switched to paper without lines after 20 years, and it's been quite liberating.
Fortunately, I was trained/forced to write on plain blank papers in school. So, I can pretty much course-correct my invisible lines. However, when I have a choice, I’ve decided to stick to dotted grids.
Hmmm! How many meetings do you do in a week? Unless, you are building a Meetings App or your company is about Meetings, I'd suggest reducing the Meetings enough that you don't have to Transcribe everything.
My meeting notes are, well, like comic books; quite a lot more drawings. So, people usually take pictures or I just take pictures and email them.
For instance, I was once in a meeting at a company planning the product roadmap for the next 3-5 years. I did a timeline-of-sort note with circles (inspired by DaisyDisk), complete with a few different colors. That note became the "official" starting base for the plan, shared across the company and referenced by the team.
Here’s the issue - all my meetings have confidential, sensitive info. I can’t use a version you host (or well, I could, but you won’t be willing to do the 6 month security review I need).
Can you give me a version I can host (or run locally) and I give you some $ one time or per year?
Love it, great idea. My humble advice: you’re on the top of HN right now—make it completely free. Overnight you could get some serious adoption (strike while the iron is hot!) Then build a few more features that people won’t be able to live without and THAT can be your paid tier.
I've put this in more words on the about page [0] but in my mind it all about the structure being first class for the regular meeting note use case, rather than a general document.
That means
- meetings notes are structured as entries, new entry in 1 click, with a template, with responsive structure
- easy to see who wrote what, everyone gets their own section
- first class action tracking and management of actions in one place
- distraction-free editor optimised for one-hand typing with only minimal formatting necessary to make notes tidy
- easier to search and navigate through history of notes
I think this applies for google docs but also other 'general' note taking tools and editors.
This reads a lot like a feature list to me. I don't understand the benefit from entries versus just an h1 tag. You can even collapse those down, and then docs will write you an index. Might be helpful to focus on the value prop more. It looks cool, but as a recovering GTD junkie, it looks more like a distraction than a core part of my everyday work.
I just realised I never dropped the link in above (doh) but I think my about page [0] does a much better job explaining than I can reproduce here.
But to get directly to your point, I just think entries give better structure than a sort of 'open doc' self-regulated-formatting type system with headers etc. You get an 'entity' that can be tagged with date&time, searched, displayed in a cluster of sections with responsive layout, etc. That's actually one of the precise things I'm trying to improve upon from my own experience with using general note taking tools for meeting notes. But I concede it could just be subjective opinion.
This might be a stretch but if you are at all up for it I would absolutely love to quiz you further on this though on a call or via email. I may have misunderstood. davnicwil at gmail, if you'd be up for it :-)
I'd say the most important part is to have a low-friction tool that fits within an individual's workflow. I like their tool, but i do agree on my side that a Notion with collapsible toggles works better for me, right now (alongside a nice cmd+k to teleport to the right pages)
As much as people like to criticize Microsoft Teams, it actually offers a feature called Facilitator [1][2][3] that, to my knowledge, works very well. I say this based on both my own experience and feedback from friends who use it in their day-to-day work.
That said, I, of course, always welcome competition.
essentially, yes! It's deliberately very focused and simple, but you also have
- actions (checkboxes) with mentions that you can track in one place
- images
- templates and one-click new entry
On the shared thing, it's opinionated in that it's not a shared single document like a google doc, rather everyone you share with gets their own section, so you can very easily see who wrote what.
Lets say I have some private and silly questions that I need to take a note of & check first or I'm venting some frustration(hey that's what happens in meetings sometimes) in the notes, what do I do ?
Well to address the elephant in the room. There is no world that I wouldn’t or shouldn’t be automatically fired for putting notes between myself and my employer in a none approved website I found on the web.
It won't be today but my goal is to earn a place on your org's approved list one day and win you as a customer :-)
Relatedly, I've had a few requests for a self hosted version already and will be offering this very soon as a priority. If that'd solve the issue also, please email me at davnicwil at gmail and I will update you when it's available.
I hate to be mean. But you never will earn a place as a one man unknown developer to be an offering at my company and be a place where we put all of our information for both confidentially reasons and we wouldn’t trust the long term viability of your company.
We already use Lattice for performance notes, peer to peer feedback and it’s a place where we put notes for our 1:1s. It integrates with Slack to remind us to enter topics before the meeting, etc.
Even with all of those objections, you won’t get anywhere in corporate America with your product unless you offer SSO. It’s not that hard to do.
I have recommended a one man SaaS once in my career to something that was critical to what I needed for a large company critical initiative. But we got lawyers involved and negotiated our own instance and the code be put in escrow with a third party that we would get access to under certain circumstances. We were going to be 70% of his post sign in revenue and growing.
So yes, if you want to start a business your most likely outcome is going to be complete failure. Your second most likely outcome is muddling along in obscurity until you give up realizing you could make more money being an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank and not work as hard. The next outcome is you might get acquired.
Unless you are decision maker for a medium to large company, you shouldn’t have heard of Lattice.
But don’t you think before someone invest time in building something they hope to be successful they look at the landscape of others in their vertical?
There is a way: you have to make something that's better in a meaningful way, so that companies' management would want to SWITCH to it. And your new shiny thing also has to be compatible with all of the integrations, the ecosystem etc. that the current thing has.
I'm not even mentioning trust issues, when sensitive data is involved.
Doing anything less and hoping that companies would use your toy project is just wishful thinking. Sorry to be that guy, but please get real.
Even a midsize company wants SSO (which is $7 a seat through Microsoft) and don’t want to have to worry about onboard and off board users individually to every SaaS product they use
Any midsize company that would trust having their proprietary information like would be in one on ones would be a complete idiot to depend on a random website.
One on ones usually feed into reviews. What guarantees would their be that the site would be up in a year?
Would you be okay with your doctor putting his notes on you in the website? Would you be okay with your accountant putting all of your financial data here?
On the contrary, I do appreciate the blunt reminder of the challenges. I'm just launching and there's some path ahead to get to the place where larger orgs could use Docket, but as I say it's my goal to get there.
You think that most companies are going to allow their proprietary information to be put on random website? That’s different than running something on your local computer.
If you think they wouldn’t mind, post your quarterly goals you discussed with your manager as a reply.
If you aren’t willing to do that, why are you willing to put your information in his website?
You do realise the internet vastly surpasses the reach of corporate america. There are another 7.5 billion people out there that aren't American that would possibly use this. You don't need American users to be a big company. If it is a good idea, it is a good idea.
I see absolutely zero mention of corporate America or any nation. It just states a way to improve meetings.
There are many people that don't have regular meetings so I'm guessing he is focusing on those that do which is a market. I wouldn't use it as personally I prefer to avoid the meetings.
It’s in the very title of the submission that its purpose is to improve note taking during 1 on 1s and he mentions that he is in plenty. Where else do you have 1 on 1s except at work?
You think a business in any other country - especially the EU where data protection requirements are even more strict - are going to allow their proprietary information to be in a random website?
You don’t have to “live in my head”. Companies value their intellectual property enough not to just put it in random websites.
Would you post your companies secrets to HN?
See what happens if he goes to let’s say Coca Cola. I’m sure they will be glad to tell their employees to put notes about the Coke formula and the discussions they had with their manager
Cuz of exactly this reason i couldnt find any solution like that for me yet, so i started building my own one. I think the only way something like this is practical is in an on-premise scenario
Is my market analysis flawed? You don’t start with premise “hey I’m trying to create something where I need your company to trust me with all of your proprietary company data and strategy”.
You can start with "hey this is useful for small businesses who don't necessarily have the same concerns" or "hey this is useful for personal notes" or any other use case that doesn't implicate the machinery of a massive bureaucracy.
Hey a couple of bugs: 1. When I create an org it doesn't appear in the list until refresh. Then, one of the two orgs I made was created twice, or is somehow displayed twice.
I tried signing up with my email (Gmail), but the message with the sign-in code never arrived (it's not in the spam folder either). Maybe your email provider has hit its sending quota?
Nice concept! I wrote this tool a while back which provides a bit more structure to your 1:1s including bubbling up latest topic to the top - https://meeteffective.com/
Thanks for sharing! I like the clean interface. Does Docket have a feature to export all your notes into some file with one go? Assuming I would use the system for a couple of years, I'd prefer to have a (local) backup of all the notes I've written.
I've been using a Mead pen-based tablet with paper-like display for that. It has some disadvantages but it's been rock solid, no firmware patches or security exploits so far, and maintains state ridiculously long without needing battery recharges.
I was emphasizing that E-Ink devices with EMR pens provide an input experience very close to writing on paper. Combine that with all the advantages of actually having a digital document. The EMR pen never needs charging, and the E-Ink device gets charged on the weekend.
I think the positive reception of this product in the comments is down to how well the simplicity aspect of it has been executed. It does one thing and does it simply.
Interesting idea. The hardest part with systems like this is getting people to actually use them week after week. Curious how you solved the adoption problem.
Almost as good as Emacs Org mode. I use Org mode with Evil, to get VIM keybindings. This way I can quickly navigate and edit the document, not just append to the end of it. And of course, Emacs is completely local.
I suppose there is supposed to be a collaborative element that Emacs won't provide. In my experience people in meetings already have workflows and are seldom interested in using the tool somebody else asks them to.
But yeah, the sharing aspect is a key thing I wanted to nail here. In my mind, it should be so simple to share and just start typing in Docket that say, the organiser of a meeting will just share the notes and it should be the simplest (or, at least, a simple) option for everyone to dive in.
Thank you for the Business plan. I'll try to provide feedback so that it benefits you as well.
RTL (right-to-left) text is displayed with LTR directionality and alignment. Even when preceding an RTL line with the RLE character, it remains left-aligned. I suggest using the method that most other software uses: detecting the first strongly-directional character in the sentence and then using that directionality. And since you provide formatting, provide also an option to override the detected directionality.
Also, the floating toolbar on mobile is maddening. It precludes reading what was written, which is very important when using e.g. a voice dictation keyboard (maybe not in meetings).
I have not tested with Docket, but do additional participants need to sign up? Ideally, sharing the URL should be enough.
That also means that the URL must be unique enough to not be guessed, and that the person initiating the session should be able to boot off users and lock the session so other users cannot join after every wanted user joins.
Thanks for sharing your work. I'm not sure I have a particular use for it at the moment, but it's well executed.
One point of (hopefully) constructive feedback is that it wasn't obvious from my first interaction with the temporary doc that I was able to create checklists and bullet points. Once I saw that those are possible, I quickly guessed the keystrokes, but it might be helpful to add some graphical guidance.
thanks! It's something I've batted around with a few friends who've tried it. I agree it's not totally clear.
On desktop, you get a little popover menu with all available formatting when you highlight some text. On mobile, it's always there when you select.
I was thinking along the lines of something like a little help icon (?) that might toggle it on desktop, some sort of overlay that only appears on first use, or just a real simple tutorial video or something. I'll think on it. Thanks for the feedback!
I like the concept but feel kinda dumb: how do I add an action?
I'd love a help button or keyboard shortcut to show keyboard shortcuts.
Thanks!
edit: I figured out the action, with putting [] first. But that was an educated guess based on some other comment here that said actions were checkboxes and me knowing more about Markdown than maybe your average meeting notetaker.
Chiming in to say I also love this app and will give it a try to see if it improves my workflow. Best of luck with it. This sort of small targeted saas is the dream.
It doesn't work that way. Paying users would discover product-market fit for the "market" of people who want to be paid to use it. Working with paying users (even if they are incredibly hard to acquire) will discover product -market fit for a market that might actually pay for your service.
I don’t want to put anybody down, but I don’t get this. What does this do that sai Apple’s Notes doesn’t? Or million other applications? And why on Earth is this hosted on web, this is something you clearly do not want to leave you device?
Also, I use pen and a notebook. It is better than anything electronic, since we are monkeys and using our eye-hand coordination has proven effects on concentration and learning.
I think my about page [0] might do a decent job providing more context and trying to answer that question.
I guess in the end it's my take on a system that I want to use for regular meeting notes with others and that I've never been able to find in any other tool, so I built it.
Well hey, good for you. That’s a good reason to built things. Maybe I don’t get it and maybe it is not for me, but it won’t stop others finding it useful.
thanks for the report. I've just double checked it works for me, and it does.
If you triggered a few login flows there may be some race condition with emails arriving out of order or something.
If you're feeling even more generous with your valuable time and want to let me know your sign in email (my email is davnicwil at gmail) I can investigate further.
The best thing for this is pen and paper. Sophisticated mechanical hand movements associated with writing help memorize things much easier than pressing fingers on a keyboard.
While I end up taking paper notes for your exact reason, I have trouble porting such notes regularly into productivity software because of the level of effort required to retranscribe my notes. As a result, paper notes suffice for short term details but once the pile of notes on my desk builds up the information is effectively lost. Something like OP's app would be perfect if handwritten notes could be used as input. Input methods via tablets/wacoms are personally cumbersome for me, so I don't know how else to rapidly preserve paper artifacts.
Quite a while back, I realized that anything digital, from phones to computers, tends to become or look like very official/non-personal and hence looks bad, especially in 1:1 meetings. I decided to go with pen and paper, in a simple Notebook (A5 or A7 is my choice). I’m do not write anything personal, but the points shared or noted down between us are enough to remind me of any points that I might have noted in my mind.
I’ve carried this habit to many other meetings (non-1:1s too), even when there is a note-taker (AI or otherwise). My meeting notes usually get shared or used as references by other participants.
Even during the meetings, other participant(s) sometimes contribute to my notes. I don’t hate digital mediums; in fact, I have used Freeform on an iPad just like I use my Notebook for meeting notes.
The interesting part is that I learnt to draw like Dan Roam[1] quite a while back. So, my notes contain texts with a lot of arrows, stick figures, shapes, etc.
Sidenote: A lot of conversations got sidetracked to discussions about paper, fountain pens, the way I write, etc.
1. https://www.danroam.com
Tangential: I also recently switched to paper without lines after 20 years, and it's been quite liberating.
are these the same things or are we reaching differently w/ the consideration
In my experience empowered coworkers make a better team and are a better deal for the company.
Maybe it was a humorous remark lost to the absence of tone in the written medium.
whoosh right past me head
How are you transcribing, or are you sharing photos?
My meeting notes are, well, like comic books; quite a lot more drawings. So, people usually take pictures or I just take pictures and email them.
For instance, I was once in a meeting at a company planning the product roadmap for the next 3-5 years. I did a timeline-of-sort note with circles (inspired by DaisyDisk), complete with a few different colors. That note became the "official" starting base for the plan, shared across the company and referenced by the team.
Here’s the issue - all my meetings have confidential, sensitive info. I can’t use a version you host (or well, I could, but you won’t be willing to do the 6 month security review I need).
Can you give me a version I can host (or run locally) and I give you some $ one time or per year?
My email is davnicwil at gmail, please email me and let's talk about it!
I'm going to give everyone who signs up today full access to everything and access to those features will be grandfathered in to any future plans.
The plans as you see them now are just rough shape anyway just to launch something!
--
UPDATE
alright that should be implemented now, and all existing signups ported (if I got everyone :-)
Everyone is now on the 'Business' plan (full access to everything) on signup
That means
- meetings notes are structured as entries, new entry in 1 click, with a template, with responsive structure
- easy to see who wrote what, everyone gets their own section
- first class action tracking and management of actions in one place
- distraction-free editor optimised for one-hand typing with only minimal formatting necessary to make notes tidy
- easier to search and navigate through history of notes
I think this applies for google docs but also other 'general' note taking tools and editors.
[0] https://withdocket.com/about
But to get directly to your point, I just think entries give better structure than a sort of 'open doc' self-regulated-formatting type system with headers etc. You get an 'entity' that can be tagged with date&time, searched, displayed in a cluster of sections with responsive layout, etc. That's actually one of the precise things I'm trying to improve upon from my own experience with using general note taking tools for meeting notes. But I concede it could just be subjective opinion.
This might be a stretch but if you are at all up for it I would absolutely love to quiz you further on this though on a call or via email. I may have misunderstood. davnicwil at gmail, if you'd be up for it :-)
[0] https://withdocket.com/about
That said, I, of course, always welcome competition.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMoGOWOBicY
[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/facilitator-in-mi...
[3] https://aka.ms/facilitator
You're in a ton of regular meetings, and you and want to take notes and actions to keep track of what's going on in them week to week.
Missing "be". Plus here is another vote for self hosted
Writer's blindness is real!
My email is davnicwil at gmail, if you email me just so I have yours I'll update you when self hosted is available
- actions (checkboxes) with mentions that you can track in one place
- images
- templates and one-click new entry
On the shared thing, it's opinionated in that it's not a shared single document like a google doc, rather everyone you share with gets their own section, so you can very easily see who wrote what.
May be add a small section for private notes ?
For now, you could temporarily turn off wifi and rant away ;-)
Relatedly, I've had a few requests for a self hosted version already and will be offering this very soon as a priority. If that'd solve the issue also, please email me at davnicwil at gmail and I will update you when it's available.
We already use Lattice for performance notes, peer to peer feedback and it’s a place where we put notes for our 1:1s. It integrates with Slack to remind us to enter topics before the meeting, etc.
Even with all of those objections, you won’t get anywhere in corporate America with your product unless you offer SSO. It’s not that hard to do.
I have recommended a one man SaaS once in my career to something that was critical to what I needed for a large company critical initiative. But we got lawyers involved and negotiated our own instance and the code be put in escrow with a third party that we would get access to under certain circumstances. We were going to be 70% of his post sign in revenue and growing.
I don't know Lattice so I would not use it.
If anyone wants to be updated when this is available, email me at davnicwil at gmail
https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...
So yes, if you want to start a business your most likely outcome is going to be complete failure. Your second most likely outcome is muddling along in obscurity until you give up realizing you could make more money being an enterprise CRUD developer at a bank and not work as hard. The next outcome is you might get acquired.
Unless you are decision maker for a medium to large company, you shouldn’t have heard of Lattice.
But don’t you think before someone invest time in building something they hope to be successful they look at the landscape of others in their vertical?
I'm not even mentioning trust issues, when sensitive data is involved.
Doing anything less and hoping that companies would use your toy project is just wishful thinking. Sorry to be that guy, but please get real.
Any midsize company that would trust having their proprietary information like would be in one on ones would be a complete idiot to depend on a random website.
One on ones usually feed into reviews. What guarantees would their be that the site would be up in a year?
IRL: I could add whatever I wanted into my computer at most places I've worked, including multi-billion$ international companies.
If your company wouldn’t mind you putting details of your 1 on 1s on his website, do you mind just emailing me those notes?
Yes it would be kind of crazy to do that wouldn’t it?
And I say that from a similar situation: I can't bring ANY executable onto my computer without corporate IT approval. Even as an untouched file.
But that isn't common in most companies.
If you think they wouldn’t mind, post your quarterly goals you discussed with your manager as a reply.
If you aren’t willing to do that, why are you willing to put your information in his website?
But that take is cliched founder take. “X is a $10 billion industry. If we just get 1% we will be a great investment”.
If someone doesn’t more narrowly target their market to something more realistic than the entire population in the world. They have already lost
There are many people that don't have regular meetings so I'm guessing he is focusing on those that do which is a market. I wouldn't use it as personally I prefer to avoid the meetings.
How often do you have meetings except at work?
I don't live in your head.
Would you post your companies secrets to HN?
See what happens if he goes to let’s say Coca Cola. I’m sure they will be glad to tell their employees to put notes about the Coke formula and the discussions they had with their manager
It's fixed now and the emails should come through.
Absolutely, yes, full export of notes (in variety of formats) is coming soon :-)
I was emphasizing that E-Ink devices with EMR pens provide an input experience very close to writing on paper. Combine that with all the advantages of actually having a digital document. The EMR pen never needs charging, and the E-Ink device gets charged on the weekend.
Almost as good as Emacs Org mode. I use Org mode with Evil, to get VIM keybindings. This way I can quickly navigate and edit the document, not just append to the end of it. And of course, Emacs is completely local.
I suppose there is supposed to be a collaborative element that Emacs won't provide. In my experience people in meetings already have workflows and are seldom interested in using the tool somebody else asks them to.
I take that as the highest compliment!
But yeah, the sharing aspect is a key thing I wanted to nail here. In my mind, it should be so simple to share and just start typing in Docket that say, the organiser of a meeting will just share the notes and it should be the simplest (or, at least, a simple) option for everyone to dive in.
RTL (right-to-left) text is displayed with LTR directionality and alignment. Even when preceding an RTL line with the RLE character, it remains left-aligned. I suggest using the method that most other software uses: detecting the first strongly-directional character in the sentence and then using that directionality. And since you provide formatting, provide also an option to override the detected directionality.
See here for more information about handling RTL:
https://dotancohen.com/howto/rtl_right_to_left.html
Also, the floating toolbar on mobile is maddening. It precludes reading what was written, which is very important when using e.g. a voice dictation keyboard (maybe not in meetings).
That also means that the URL must be unique enough to not be guessed, and that the person initiating the session should be able to boot off users and lock the session so other users cannot join after every wanted user joins.
Who am I kidding? If anybody ever gets their meeting partners to actually install and use this, I want to hear about it.
One point of (hopefully) constructive feedback is that it wasn't obvious from my first interaction with the temporary doc that I was able to create checklists and bullet points. Once I saw that those are possible, I quickly guessed the keystrokes, but it might be helpful to add some graphical guidance.
On desktop, you get a little popover menu with all available formatting when you highlight some text. On mobile, it's always there when you select.
I was thinking along the lines of something like a little help icon (?) that might toggle it on desktop, some sort of overlay that only appears on first use, or just a real simple tutorial video or something. I'll think on it. Thanks for the feedback!
I'd love a help button or keyboard shortcut to show keyboard shortcuts.
Thanks!
edit: I figured out the action, with putting [] first. But that was an educated guess based on some other comment here that said actions were checkboxes and me knowing more about Markdown than maybe your average meeting notetaker.
But yeah, I need to make the formatting and shortcuts available much clearer somehow. Thanks for the feedback!
Just for reference in case anyone else finds this comment, we have
action: []
bullet: - at the start of a line
indent: tab and shift tab
bold: cmd+B / ctrl+B
emojis: type : and it brings up an autocomplete selector
image: just paste one in
---
You can also highlight any word to bring up a small popup panel with all these options too.
What browser are you on if you don't mind me asking?
Also, I use pen and a notebook. It is better than anything electronic, since we are monkeys and using our eye-hand coordination has proven effects on concentration and learning.
I guess in the end it's my take on a system that I want to use for regular meeting notes with others and that I've never been able to find in any other tool, so I built it.
[0] https://withdocket.com/about
If you triggered a few login flows there may be some race condition with emails arriving out of order or something.
If you're feeling even more generous with your valuable time and want to let me know your sign in email (my email is davnicwil at gmail) I can investigate further.
But I agree with the other commenter about taking handwritten notes. I use pencil and paper and type them up into org-mode afterwards.
Also shout-out to Attendee which is OSS for building meeting bots https://github.com/attendee-labs/attendee