In pursuit of the paperless meeting

I believe there are three reasons why some people still capture meeting notes on paper:

It's a cultural habit. Behavior in meetings is governed by corporate and national culture, from how we exchange business cards to how we talk to what we wear. Pulling out a nice pen and taking notes on paper is part of that cultural habit.
The company doesn't care. The transition from paper to digital bits and bytes was all about bringing measurable improvements to business processes and the bottom line. Note-taking is all about personal effectiveness, not the company's. So when it comes to note-taking technology, you're on your own. Few companies are likely to build electronic note-taking into the IT budget.
Every aspect of our "meetings culture" is broken, obsolete, inefficient and costly. We work hard at our desks but tend to view meetings as long coffee breaks where we can zone out, indulge the impulse to show off or play politics. Conversation tends to meander, rarely concluding with clear action items and completion deadlines. Letting all the decisions, ideas and information from meetings get lost on individual paper notepads is part of what makes meetings so time-inefficient and cost-ineffective.

Many of use have tried different ways to record data but nothing that exists today is as easy and immediate as pen and paper. I use paper and pens in all my meetings - laptops get in the way and are still too cumbersome for face to face meetings. The act of writing itself also allows for greater retention of the data you are recording and hasn't anyone else been taught how taking notes on paper first and typing them out later aids in memory retention? If you are serious about your work it's worth the trouble. Until we have interfaces as good as pen the paperless meeting remains a pipe dream.

In pursuit of the paperless meeting