How to Take Notes in Granola | Using the Notes Feature

Granola automatically transcribes your meetings and turns them into notes, but you can also jot down your own notes while a meeting is happening.

These aren’t just a personal memo, either. Granola treats whatever you type as “important information” and factors it into the notes the AI generates.

So there’s no need to write everything down during the meeting — it’s best to just jot down the specific points you want to make sure get captured.

Typing notes into Notes during a meeting

Once you start a meeting in Granola, the “Note Editor” appears on screen.

It starts out completely blank, so just type in whatever notes you want as you listen to the conversation.

For example, jotting down something as simple as this is plenty:

Deadline is next Tuesday
Prioritize the homepage design
Send the quote before next time

Granola treats whatever’s written here as key points. When it generates the notes after the meeting ends, it takes what you typed into account while organizing everything.

Don’t worry about typos or abbreviations

When you’re taking notes while listening to a conversation, there isn’t always room to write clean, polished sentences.

With Granola, though, you don’t need to worry too much about typos or shorthand. The AI cross-references what you wrote against the conversation itself and turns it into natural, readable text.

During a meeting, for example, notes as bare-bones as this are completely fine:

by next tue
tanaka confirm
design first
send quote

Rather than writing finished sentences, it’s best to treat this as leaving yourself keywords to jog your memory later.

Adding headings and lists with Markdown

In Notes, you can use basic Markdown syntax to structure your notes.

Using headings and bullet points doesn’t just make it easier to look back over your own notes — it also helps the AI organize the structure of the notes it generates.

Headings

Type # at the start of a line to create a heading.

# Agenda

# Decisions

# Action items for next time

It’s also handy to set up headings ahead of time to match what the meeting is actually about.

Bullet points

Type - or * at the start of a line to create a bullet point.

- Change the layout of the homepage
- Client will provide the photo assets
- Submit the first draft by next week

Checkboxes

To create a checklist, use this format:

- [ ] Send the quote
- [ ] Receive the assets
- [ ] Book the next meeting

This is handy for organizing tasks that come up during the meeting.

Bold, italic, underline

You can make especially important parts stand out using bold and the like.

**Important point**
*Supplementary info*

You can also apply bold with Cmd/Ctrl + B, italic with Cmd/Ctrl + I, and underline with Cmd/Ctrl + U.

Adding images to Notes

Notes can hold images too, not just text.

If something like shared materials, a design you want to reference, or a screenshot comes up during the meeting, you can add JPEG or PNG images straight into Notes.

Adding an image is easy — just drag and drop it onto the Notes pane, or paste a copied image directly.

Saving images alongside your notes gives the AI extra context, and also makes it easier to follow what happened when you look back at the meeting later.

Notes can be left blank

You don’t have to take your own notes every time you use Granola.

Even if you leave Notes completely empty, Granola will still generate notes based on the transcribed conversation and the basic details it has about the meeting.

So if you’d rather focus fully on the conversation, it’s fine to skip Notes entirely and leave everything to the AI.

That said, jotting down just the following kinds of things yourself makes it easier for Granola to produce notes that match your actual intent:

• Statements you felt were especially important
• Decisions that were made
• Tasks you’re responsible for
• Things to check on before next time
• Extra context that’s hard to convey through the transcript alone

The trick to using Granola’s Notes well isn’t trying to capture the entire conversation — it’s leaving behind just the points you want the AI to pay attention to.

Wrapping up

Granola’s Notes isn’t a feature for writing a complete set of minutes yourself — it’s a way to steer the direction of the notes the AI creates.

Don’t worry about typos or messy phrasing — just jot down the key words and decisions, and Granola will combine that with the conversation itself to organize everything naturally.

Notes get generated even if you write nothing at all, but leaving even just the key points in Notes makes it easier to end up with notes that actually fit what you need.

One more thing — if you sign up through my referral link, your first month is 100% off when you upgrade to a paid plan. This can’t be linked retroactively, so if you’re just getting started with Granola, I’d really appreciate it if you signed up free through my link.