The daughter's name, the knee surgery. What to write down after meeting someone.

All the advice about being good with people arrives at the same instruction: take notes. Then it stops, which is unhelpful, because the difference between a note that is worth something a year later and a note that is landfill is entirely in what you chose to put in it.

Here is the version we would give a friend.

What is worth keeping

Start with what is going on in their world right now. Not the job title, which you can look up, and not what the company does. The live thing: the restructure they are sitting inside, the product launching in November, the office move, the person they are trying to hire. This is what makes your next message land, because it is the thing they are actually thinking about.

Then anything you said you would do. The intro you offered. The article you promised. The name you said you would dig out. Write it in their words, not yours: "send the piece about pricing pages" will still make sense in March, and "follow up re that thing" will not. If you only ever capture one item, capture this one. It is the only note that is also a debt.

Then one human detail. Exactly one, and pick the one that made the conversation feel like a conversation. The daughter about to start school. The knee surgery they are dreading. The half marathon they are training for and slightly regret. This is what separates being remembered from being filed.

And how you came to be talking at all. Who introduced you, at what, and why. This is the detail that decays fastest and matters longest, because in two years it is the whole basis of the relationship and neither of you will remember it.

What to leave out

A transcript. The instinct to capture everything is the instinct that kills the habit, because writing it is slow and reading it is slower. A full record of a conversation is a thing you will never open. Three lines is a thing you will read in a lift.

Your verdict on them. Not because it is useless, but because it ages badly and reads terribly. "Seemed a bit scattered" was true of one Tuesday and will colour every interaction you have for five years. Write what happened, not who you decided they are.

The details of anything sensitive. If someone tells you their marriage is in trouble, or that they are unwell, or that they are quietly job hunting, you need almost none of it written down. What you need is enough to be kind: that something hard is going on, and roughly when. The specifics are theirs, and you are not the right custodian for them.

The line

Would this note embarrass you if they read it over your shoulder? If yes, it does not go in. There is no third answer and no clever exception.

That test is stricter than any policy and it survives contact with real life, which most policies do not. It also produces better notes, because notes written as though the subject might see them are notes about the person rather than about your opinion of them.

Two corollaries. If someone prefaces something with "between us", that is a request, and you honour it by not writing it down at all. And if a note would be awkward in a court, an audit or a subject access request, it is already the wrong note, whatever tool it lives in.

The same coffee, written down twice

The first version is what most people write when they are trying to be thorough.

The second one took about forty seconds to say out loud, and it contains a reason to make contact, a promise you now owe, something human to open with, and the origin of the whole relationship. The first one contains a verdict and some weather.

Where it should live

Attached to the person, and back in front of you before you see them. That is the whole specification, and it rules out more tools than you would think. A notebook fails it. A notes app you have to search fails it in the moment that matters, which is standing outside a meeting room. So does a document called Contacts with last year in the title.

With bondai the capture half is a voice note. You say the three lines walking back to the car and it writes them up, files them under the right person, and turns the promise into a reminder. Nothing to type, nothing to file. The retrieval half is the point though. The note reaches you before you see them, on their profile, next to what has changed in their world since. You walk in prepared without doing the prep. How that plays out is in know the person before you meet.

One thing we would push back on, gently, whatever you use. Do not let a bot in the room do this for you. A summariser will give you everything, which is another way of saying it will give you nothing to act on, and it introduces a consent question you did not need to have. That argument is in a bot in the room is not a memory.

Common questions