“The Best Managers Aren’t Taking Notes — They’re Paying Attention”

Mike Ashie

Leadership Manager · Leadership Content Creator · Management Coach

Most managers don’t fail because they lack leadership skills. They fail because they spend the entire day cognitively overloaded.

By the time most leaders reach the afternoon, they’re already behind — jumping between meetings, answering questions, solving problems, and trying to keep everything from slipping through the cracks. The issue usually isn’t capability. It’s friction.

Mike Ashie has spent years teaching managers how to lead with more clarity, structure, and focus. But he noticed something ironic happening in his own meetings:

The harder he tried to capture everything, the less present he became.

“Trying to listen, think, lead, and write everything down at the same time — that doesn’t work,” Mike says. “Something always drops.”

For managers, the modern workday is filled with constant context-switching. Team check-ins, project reviews, performance conversations, stakeholder updates, hiring discussions — every meeting contains decisions that matter. And in most of them, managers are expected to do two jobs at once: lead the conversation while documenting it.

Mike realized that manual note-taking had quietly become part of the problem.

“The best managers in the room aren’t the ones writing the most notes,” he says. “They’re the ones noticing the most.”

The hidden cost of divided attention

Leadership isn’t just about giving direction. It’s about noticing what other people miss.

A hesitation before someone answers. A concern that’s implied but never directly stated. The shift in tone when priorities change. Those signals are often where the real conversation happens — and they’re easy to miss when your attention is split between listening and writing.

“Most interruptions in a manager’s day aren’t actually problems,” Mike explains. “They’re confusion. And if you’re too busy trying to capture everything, you stop seeing where the confusion is really coming from.”

Like many professionals, Mike had experimented with different ways to stay organized: handwritten notes, task managers, meeting summaries, and voice memos. But none of them solved the core issue.

He didn’t need more information. He needed a way to stay fully engaged in the room without worrying about losing what mattered.

Why Mike started using Scriben

Mike was initially skeptical when he first heard about Scriben.

“I thought, ‘An AI pen? Really?’” he says. “That was honestly my first reaction.”

But after trying it in meetings, he realized the value wasn’t the technology itself. It was the removal of mental overhead.

Scriben works like a normal pen, but with built-in AI meeting capture. During conversations, Mike can simply press the device to capture the discussion while staying fully focused on the people in front of him. After the meeting, Scriben organizes the conversation into structured summaries, action items, and searchable notes inside the app.

“Instead of trying to keep up with every single thing being said, I can actually do my job,” Mike says. “I can listen better, ask better questions, and read the room.”

That shift changed more than his workflow. It changed the quality of his leadership conversations.

Turning meetings into momentum

One of Mike’s core leadership principles is that meetings should create movement, not just discussion.

“Most meetings go nowhere,” he says. “You talk, you align, everyone nods — and then nothing actually moves.”

His rule is simple: every meeting should end with three things:

• A decision

• An owner

• A next step

Without those, he argues, it wasn’t really a meeting — it was just a conversation.

Scriben became part of that process by reducing the administrative burden that usually follows meetings. Instead of spending extra time reconstructing discussions or sorting through scattered notes, Mike already has organized action items and key takeaways ready immediately afterward.

“It quietly removes friction,” he says. “And when you remove enough friction, leadership gets lighter.”

Creating space to think again

For Mike, the biggest leadership advantage isn’t speed. It’s clarity.

The managers he respects most aren’t constantly reacting to notifications or drowning in follow-ups. They protect time to think — time to evaluate decisions, prioritize effectively, and lead proactively instead of defensively.

But thinking clearly becomes difficult when your brain is overloaded trying to remember everything from every conversation.

That’s where Mike believes systems matter.

“Winning the day isn’t about working harder,” he says. “It’s about removing the things that slow you down.”

For him, Scriben became one of those systems: a simple way to reduce cognitive load so he could focus on leadership itself instead of administrative capture.

The bottom line

Mike Ashie believes leadership is ultimately about presence. The ability to notice, respond, and guide people clearly in moments that matter.

“The best managers aren’t carrying everything by themselves,” he says. “They build systems that help them stay focused on the people in front of them.”

For Mike, Scriben isn’t just an AI note-taking tool. It’s a way to stay fully engaged in conversations without losing the details that matter afterward.

And in a workday filled with nonstop meetings, that difference compounds quickly.

About Mike Ashie

Mike Ashie is a leadership manager and management content creator focused on helping professionals lead with greater clarity, communication, and effectiveness. His work centers on reducing friction in modern management and building systems that help teams perform at a higher level.