Someone says, "Can somebody grab the notes?" and the room goes quiet. Eyes drop to laptops. A pen gets very interesting. Four seconds pass, maybe five. Then one person sighs, almost inaudibly, and says, "I can do it."

You probably know who that person is in your meetings. You may be that person. And if you are, you have likely told yourself a flattering story about it: I'm just organized. I don't mind. Someone has to.

Someone does have to. That is exactly the trap.

The game nobody realizes they're playing

Game theorists have a name for this moment: the volunteer's dilemma, described by the economist Andreas Diekmann in the 1980s. The setup is simple. A group needs one person to do a small, necessary thing. Everyone is better off if it gets done. But each person would rather it be someone else.

If nobody volunteers, everyone loses: no notes, no follow-up, no booked room. If one person volunteers, everyone else gets the benefit for free, and the volunteer pays the cost alone.

That is a nasty structure, because the "rational" move is to wait. And waiting is not a character flaw. In a room where every person is waiting, the silence is just the sound of the game being played.

What the game doesn't tell you is who breaks first. That part turns out to be anything but random.

Not all work counts the same

The tasks that fall into the volunteer's dilemma at work share a feature: they matter to the team but do little for your career. Taking minutes, organizing the offsite, onboarding the new hire, serving on the committee nobody wanted. Researchers call these non-promotable tasks, meaning work that is necessary and valued by the organization but unlikely to be rewarded with a promotion or a raise.

Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart studied this in a paper published in the American Economic Review in 2017. Their lab experiments put people in small groups where someone needed to take on a task that benefited the group but earned the volunteer less. They found two things working together:

  • Women were more likely to volunteer for the task.
  • Women were also more likely to be asked, and when asked directly, more likely to say yes.

The researchers described both a request side and an acceptance side. Groups leaned on women to take the task, and women felt more pressure to accept it. Babcock and colleagues later wrote about this in the book The No Club, arguing that the cost is a quiet one: hours that could have gone to visible, promotable work go instead to the unglamorous glue of the organization.

It isn't only a gender story, to be fair. Junior people, newer people and people from underrepresented groups often report the same pull. What they share is a sense that saying no will cost them more than it costs the person next to them. That belief is often correct, which is why it works so well as a trap.

Why "I don't mind" is usually only half true

Most people who end up with these tasks genuinely don't mind any single instance. Taking notes for one meeting is trivial. That is what makes the pattern so hard to see.

The cost is cumulative, and it hides in three places.

You are never fully in the conversation. Writing the record is a different job from thinking about the topic. The person transcribing the decision is rarely the person shaping it.

The label sticks. Once you take the notes twice, it becomes "your thing." Nobody decides this. A default simply forms, and defaults are very hard to unseat because they feel like a shared understanding.

The work becomes invisible by being routine. When the same person always does it, it stops being work and turns into weather. Nobody thanks you for the weather.

None of this means the task is beneath anyone. Good notes are a real skill, and they genuinely shape what a team remembers. The problem is distribution, not dignity.

Fix the structure, not the person

The tempting advice is "just say no." It is not wrong, but it asks one individual to absorb all the social risk of breaking a group pattern. That is the same lopsided burden in a different form.

The volunteer's dilemma is a structural problem, so the strongest fixes are structural. If the task has an owner by rule, nobody has to out-wait anyone. The silence disappears because the question has already been answered.

Teams that make this work tend to do the same few things: they rotate the task on a visible schedule, they decide the assignment before the meeting instead of during the awkward pause, and they treat the work as real work, with time carved out and credit given.

Your next moves

  • Count before you change anything. Look back over your last ten meetings or team tasks and write down who took the notes, who booked the room, who planned the farewell card. Do this today. Patterns that feel like "I guess it's always me" become much easier to raise when they are numbers on a page.
  • Propose a rotation, in writing. Send one short message: "Let's rotate notes alphabetically so nobody carries it every time. I'll take this week; next week is [name]." Taking the first turn yourself makes it easy to say yes to, and you only volunteer once.
  • Assign before the pause. If you run the meeting, put "Notes: [name]" on the agenda in advance. If you don't run it, ask the organizer to do so. A pre-assigned role never has to survive five seconds of silence.
  • Practice one redirect line. Try: "I took them last time. Who's up this round?" It states a fact, asks a question, and doesn't accuse anyone. Say it out loud once today so it exists in your mouth before you need it.
  • Pair every non-promotable task with a visible one. If you do accept the housework, ask in the same breath for an equivalent chance to present, lead, or own a decision. Trade, don't just donate.
  • Credit others when it's their turn. When a colleague takes the notes, thank them by name, in the channel everyone reads. Visible gratitude is how a chore starts to count as contribution.

Making the record fair, and useful

Once notes rotate, a bonus appears: more people learn how decisions get captured, and the team's memory stops depending on one person's habits. The quality improves, too, because a template and a shared standard replace one person's private style.

What tends to go unspoken is how much of a meeting's lasting value lives in the follow-through: who agreed to what, what was actually decided, which question was left open. Capturing that is a job worth doing well and worth sharing.

That is the thinking behind MeetingMortem, an app for looking back at your meetings with a little more honesty: what happened in the room, how it felt, and who ended up carrying what. If you want a quiet place to notice patterns like the one above, you can look at it at https://meetingmortem.lumenlabs.works. But the first step costs nothing. Next time the room goes silent, notice who looks down, and who sighs. Then ask who had it last time.