What to write down when you meet someone: four fields, nothing else.

The blank note by the coffee urn

The conversation ends the way most good ones do at a conference: a handshake, a "let's stay in touch," and they're gone into the crowd. You pull out your phone and open a note. The cursor blinks. Someone else is already drifting toward you.

So you type their name. Maybe "great chat, follow up." Then the phone goes back in your pocket.

That note is the problem. A name plus "great chat" tells you nothing the card won't already tell you, and it carries none of what made the conversation worth having. Multiply it by thirty people over two days and you've built a contact list of strangers you've technically met.

The usual explanation is laziness. A likelier one: nobody ever told you what a good note contains.

The Four-Field Rule

Capture four things, in this order, and stop.

Where you met. What you talked about. One specific detail that proves you were listening. What you said you'd do.

That's the whole note. Four short lines, typed standing up. Anything beyond that is overhead, and overhead is what kills the habit by the second afternoon of an event.

Each field has its own job. Where is your retrieval key, the thing you'll search when you remember the room but not the name. What is the topic, kept to a phrase. The detail is what makes your eventual message sound like it came from someone who was actually there. And the commitment is the only field with an owner and a deadline attached, which is exactly why it's the one people forget to write.

Four lines, typed standing up. Everything else is overhead.

Why "take better notes" fails, and so does the CRM template

Capture advice tends to come in two sizes, and both produce the same result: nothing written down.

The small size is "take notes." Correct and useless. Take notes on what? In an expo aisle with a lanyard swinging and a coffee in one hand, an open instruction collapses into a name and nothing else, because people type the easiest thing available.

The large size is the CRM template. Lead source, company, title, segment, deal stage, next step, phone, priority. Every one of those fields makes sense back at a desk, and half of them are printed on the card anyway. In the aisle, eight fields is a form. Nobody fills out a form between handshakes. They skip it, planning to come back later, and later turns into a pile of cards.

Both fail at the same point: they're written for whoever reviews the notes afterward, and the person standing in the aisle pays the cost.

Three products landed on the same four fields

The case for a short, fixed note is mostly a case from friction. A note you have to think about is a note you skip, and the moment right after a conversation is rarely a calm one. Someone else is waiting to talk to you, the next person is already walking over, and your attention is gone. A few fixed prompts are about all that survives that.

People clearly want help with this. General productivity coverage has taken it on for years, including Lifehacker's ["How to Remember People You Meet at Networking Events"](https://lifehacker.com/how-to-remember-people-you-meet-at-networking-events-1796449886) from July 2017. What's harder to find is a plain, prescriptive answer to what to write down.

What should you write down after meeting someone? A worked example

Take a common scenario. A regional account executive spends ten minutes with an operations director at a healthcare trade show. They talk about the director's team moving shift scheduling off spreadsheets. Somewhere in there, the director mentions leaving early for a son's robotics competition. The AE offers to send a short list of scheduling vendors other hospitals use.

The table below shows what usually gets typed, next to the four-field version. Name, title and company come off the card. Everything in the right-hand column comes from the conversation, and none of it can be rebuilt later from a badge scan.

About twenty-six words. The left column is a few seconds faster and close to worthless a week later.

What to leave out of your networking notes

If the four fields are right, a lot of familiar note-taking habits can go.

Title, company, email and phone are on the card or the badge, so typing them is duplicate work. Company size, deal stage and priority are judgments you'll make better at a desk with the whole list in front of you. Your read on the person ("sharp," "pushy," "good energy") feels useful in the moment and turns to noise later, because an adjective doesn't help you write a message.

The detail field is where most people go soft. "Has kids" won't help you. "Son's robotics competition this weekend" will, because it's specific enough to mention and recent enough to matter.

And if you committed to nothing, write that. "No promise made" is information too. It tells future you there's no debt to pay on this one.

Where Met fits in the aisle

The four-field rule works in any plain notes app. What a notes app won't fix is the friction around it: switching apps, typing a name you could have scanned, digging the note out again a week later.

Met is built for the moment you walk away. Scan the card and the fields a scanner can read are handled, so your thumbs go to the four it can't. Event Mode keeps the room captured while you keep talking Yes. In Event Mode, each scan saves automatically with the event's name already filled in as where you met the person, and the contact is linked to that event. You don't tag anyone by hand, and you can add notes or a tone later from the wrap-up screen or the event page. The app doesn't use GPS or location to do this. The event name is the context.. iCloud-only storage means your contacts stay yours.

Whatever you use, the test holds. If a note can't tell you where, what, one real detail and what you owe, it's a name with extra steps. The follow-up side picks up in [The 72-Hour Memory Cliff](/articles/72-hour-memory-cliff/), right where capture ends.