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For you who prefer listening to reading, this post is also available as an episode of the ""Done!"" podcast:

Look back and show progress

The need here is twofold, as I see it. First, you want to be able to review what was decid­ed at the meet­ing as a whole, and sec­ond, see what becomes of each deci­sion that was made. I imag­ine five steps you can take.

Do this

1. Choose a place and for­mat for meet­ing notes as a whole. Do you take notes in OneNote, on one page per meet­ing, in the sec­tion ded­i­cat­ed to that meet­ing forum in the shared note­book? Or, should the notes be in Google Docs? Or in Word?
2. Decide how each meet­ing note will be named. What for­mat should the file name always have? What infor­ma­tion should the head­ing of the note always con­tain? If you name them dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on what the per­son tak­ing notes feels like at the moment, you will have to spend unnec­es­sary time search­ing lat­er on.
3. Cre­ate a tem­plate for the notes, or at least decide how the deci­sions made in the meet­ing should be marked so that they stand out from the rest of the text.
4. Addi­tion­al­ly, select a loca­tion to observe how each deci­sion is imple­ment­ed and ulti­mate­ly com­plet­ed. If the per­son tak­ing notes in OneNote sets an Out­look flag at each deci­sion, so that a to-do task is cre­at­ed in To-Do and Out­look Tasks, which the note-tak­er can assign to the per­son respon­si­ble for imple­men­ta­tion? Or, is it sent to anoth­er list tool that you use instead? Or, do you have a Trel­lo board or Plan­ner plan where deci­sions move through the columns ​“Not start­ed”, ​“In progress” and final­ly ​“Com­plet­ed”?
5. Test the pro­ce­dure dur­ing a cou­ple of meet­ings to ensure the flow from meet­ing to imple­men­ta­tion to the next meet­ing works smoothly.

No doubt!

If you agree in a way to log your deci­sions over time, few­er things will fall through the cracks. What you decide will be imple­ment­ed to a greater extent than before, and you will get more con­crete results from the work you put in. Dur­ing and between meet­ings, you can all see clear­ly who is respon­si­ble for what and how far the imple­men­ta­tion of each deci­sion has pro­gressed. No doubts!

How do you do it?

Do you use a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent method to log your deci­sions? Per­haps you use a tool that you think works phe­nom­e­nal­ly? Please write to me and let me know! I look for­ward to hear­ing from you.

(Speak­ing of meet­ings, we all wish for them to go smooth­ly and effi­cient­ly, don’t we? But this isn’t always the case. Check out this mod­el on how to put a end to unstruc­tured meet­ings!)