Please - bring your laptop into meetings!

"Alexandra Samuel is Vice-President of Social Media at Vision Critical, a market research technology provider. She is the author of Work Smarter with Evernote (Harvard Business Review Press, December 2012). Follow her on Twitter at @awsamuel."
I'd call that one step short of shilling for Evernote.  Now, don't get me wrong - I have /thousands/ of entries in Evernote - I love it.  And I'll be walking in to a meeting this morning with a paper notebook and pen.
 
G.
 
 

A few senior folks in work have started to bring iPads in to the meeting room. Also seen senior clients do the same. As an Org we seem to be going more and more towards using tech in the meeting room. 
I'm desperate to bring my ipad and use it to record notes rather than having to use pen and paper - then transfer to my tracking system - would be amazing to miss that step! I won't give in however!
It is clear what the author of the blog is trying to push...
Regards, 
Gareth

to express the sheer *wrongness* of this article.  A point-by-point rebuttal of all of the misconceptions would be somewhat pointless.  I think this bit really sums it up, though:
"Unless you reserve 20 minutes after each meeting to transcribe your notes and enter your follow-up tasks, however, most of this meeting's value will slip like sand through a sieve. And if you're taking 20 minutes to transcribe each meeting, you're losing several hours per week of productive work time."
If it takes you 20 minutes to extract the useful parts from your meeting notes, then either (a) you're really slow at putting things into your todo system; (b) you got given a lot of things to do out of that meeting; or (c) you need to stop TRANSCRIBING everything.
On the other hand, I do often spend 20 minutes after a meeting with the notes from that meeting.  However, I'm doing something that the author doesn't appear to have taken account of: thinking.  All this frenetic energy around taking notes directly on your laptop and then having a complete searchable record of everything completely misses the point that unless you spend some time thinking about what something means to you and your organisation, the information is of no value.  Being able to search 10 years worth of notes isn't worth squat if I never remembered I wrote it down in the first place.

 I too use pen and paper for notes as well as Evernote for my note organization. I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap and when I get back to my desk I tear off my notes, scan them as PDFs into Evernote, which then indexes them and makes them searchable. A few handy tags, maybe move it to a particular notebook, and maybe type a couple of notes into the same note I scanned my handwritten notes in and I'm done. Typically less than 30 seconds of "extra" work.
Taking notes on a webpad is totally impossible from my perspective and any typing would distract both myself and others around me from the actual meeting content.
That said, having an iPad in some of my meetings would have been useful from time to time. In a former org we used bug-tracking software as a primary project management tool. Being able to look up a bug on the fly, or take a look at the metrics of myself or one of the other team members would have been useful.
 

I think we are also missing the point on retention. Putting pen to paper (the old fashioned way) helps you remember. There's plenty of research on this point.
Also, I can take a look at my action items (circled per the MT advice) and update my task list/calendar immediately after the meeting. I'd need to do the same thing if I had electronic notes.
Perhaps it's just in my position, but how many times do you actually have to go back to the notes you took three weeks ago? Typically, the action items are the deliverables. If you have any kind of reasonble paper filing system, you can get to them. Evernote provides a fine solution as per the previous poster.