A lot of my notes come from the presenters’ slides. I’m a fairly fast typist and a decent multitasker, so I copy down the slide bullets in a background brain thread while I listen to the presenter talk about them. Then I go back and tweak them as I go — add details that they mention verbally and that I find interesting, or remove details that were in the slide that I don’t feel are as necessary to my understanding.

Then there’s always the Q&A from the audience, where I do the best I can without slides and bullets. When I have a good depth of understanding, I’ll try to fit it into what I write down, and elaborate a bit on the question or the answer or the side effects.

I can usually tell pretty quickly if this is a presenter who talks fast and breezes through the slides, and if that’s the case, I’ll elide details the first time — only note the top-level bullets and skip sub-bullets, for example, and then fill them in if they happen to dwell on a particular slide.

Nothing all that fancy, though, and I don’t have any special methodology or anything. Like I said, I just write stuff down.