Thread by @patio11

Friendly neighborhood Dangerous Professional advice:

If you are ever at a meeting taking notes, and someone at the meeting expresses umbrage that notes are being taken of the meeting, and this is routine notetaking for this genre of meeting, …

… you should absolutely want to keep physical control of those notes, and you should prioritize that over social pressure you may perceive, and you should update very aggressively against the umbrage-taker as being likely up to no good.

You should also, immediately after the meeting, document the fact that you were taking notes at a meeting and asked to stop, and that you felt in that moment this ask was extraordinary.

You can keep that in your files, or you can email it to your boss as an FYI, but you want that time stamped and you want the fact of it having happened to be institutionally undeniable.

This thread is invariably going to be read as a subtweet of shenanigans happening in New York. It is. It is also sincere advice from someone who, once in a long career, was told to not take notes, in a circumstance notes were always taken.

Immediately after the meeting I hand wrote a transcript from memory. I cannot tell you anything else, for obvious reasons, but I regret absolutely nothing about that decision.

“Is the transcript going to be seen as authoritative?”

Dangerous Professional observes that memories are such fragile things but if there is only one contemporaneously produced transcript to choose from well.

Dangerous Professional: Sorry Stringer Bell, I am definitely not a member of a criminal conspiracy.

“Hand wrote?”

So that a keyword search of my laptop/etc would not have turned up the notes.

Yep, you are indeed perceiving an implication as to how worried I was.

Still here! Feels like a Tom Clancy novel in the moment, resolves as farce, as these things *sometimes* do.

Relatedly, while I think companies have legitimate concerns about confidential information ending up on systems they do not control, I have been known from time to time to keep a diary. Always mean to do more of it but you know, it’s like going to the gym.

I use Day One; YMMV.

Now let me make two observations:

1) You can choose to start keeping or resume keeping a diary on any given Tuesday. Not even a little bit odd!

2) Dear diary,

I had a funny dream about my mother. Dinner today was great. Weirdest thing happened at work though: …

Three years later “Oh yes I do have contemporaneous written record of events. You see, I keep a diary. On the entry for the day in question…”

Some people find writing diary entries to be a bit of a drag and so one thing I have experimented with is e.g. a 1-5 minute video entry which is exactly as easy to produce as any other video on an iPhone and exactly as timestamped as a regular written diary. So pleasant.

Also while you might feel a little weird about putting “(this made me uncomfortable)” in notes seen by your coworkers well who could possibly object to you confessing your emotional state to your diary in a way only ever seen if you want it to be.

Will have to write my Dangerous Professional post someday soon; keeps being too relevant in too many ways to life.

Anyhow, final observation.

"Will this be seen as disingenuous by e.g. law enforcement/courts/etc reviewing conduct later?"

Hello fellow Dangerous Professionals.

Of course they know why you're doing it. They have their own files and their own memos and their own calendars and their own...

And when they see you doing it, they don't think "Up to know good." They think "That person: useful friend or in alternative risky to mess with."

*no good