So what can you do about it?

Some people lug their laptop into meetings and peck out notes on it. However, that creates what feels like a breach of etiquette. Placing a wall (the laptop screen) between you and others in the meeting is rude, tapping on the keys is annoying, and the fact that you're looking at your screen rather than paying attention" can be suspicious.

You could buy a tablet PC, but that's an expensive form of overkill for simple note-taking. You could scan, then process, your paper notes with optical character recognition software. But that's more trouble than it's worth.

In a perfect world, you would take notes with a pen, just as you do now, but have those notes magically "captured" as machine-readable text.

The good news is that you can buy gadgets that get you pretty close to this "perfect world." Here are the best of the lot.