Most people capture meeting notes fine. Finding them three weeks later is the problem. This is fixable, whatever tool you use.
How to Organize Your Meeting Notes
Use Your Meeting Assistant's Built-In Features
Before building any system on top, most people underuse what their note-taking app already gives them. Conversational search. Summaries that pull out decisions and action items. Templates for recurring meetings. Char, Otter, Granola, Fireflies, all of them have this to some degree.
Start there. Search is good enough now that a lot of organizational overhead simply isn't necessary anymore. Most things you'd want to find are one query away.
If You're Using Char, You Are Already at an Advantage
With most meeting note-takers, you're renting space in their database. Switch tools and getting your notes out cleanly is harder than it should be.
Char, on the other hand, saves your notes as plain markdown files on your own device. That one difference opens up a lot.
Markdown files are just text. Any tool can read them, which means your meeting history isn't locked in a platform. The files travel with you and work with anything, regardless of what Char does in the future.
In practice that means you can open your notes folder directly in Obsidian and start linking meetings to projects, people. Drop the same folder into Logseq if you prefer a more task-and-outline focused workflow. Open it in VS Code and run search across hundreds of files in seconds. Point Claude Code at the folder to organize it how you'd like.
None of that requires any setup beyond having the files on your computer. That's the point.
If You're Taking Notes Manually
The organizational options are the same, with one extra step first: get your notes into a consistent place and a consistent format. A folder of plain text or markdown files, named by date and meeting, works fine.
The format matters less than the habit. Get your notes somewhere consistent, and the rest becomes much easier.
