The blog

Some­times you might find your­self in a meet­ing with­out your laptop. 



In spite of that you had decid­ed to always take notes dur­ing meet­ings using the com­put­er, you now have to take notes by hand. 



If you, like I, pre­fer to always take notes on reg­u­lar paper, the notepad will be your tool dur­ing all meetings. 

Sift­ing out takes time

You want to get going with the tasks you were assigned to do dur­ing the meet­ing as soon as pos­si­ble once the meet­ing is over, so you skim through your notes to iden­ti­fy the tasks you need to do.



In a best-case sce­nario, you have made notes in one of our Som smort!-mötesblock (Notepads for smoother and bet­ter note-tak­ing dur­ing meet­ings) and will then not have to gath­er any­thing, since the to-do-tasks are neat­ly not­ed at the bot­tom of the page. 



But if you do not have such a tool or note-pad at hand yet (or do not have it with you to the meet­ing), you will have to spend time look­ing through your notes and sift­ing out the tasks you need to pro­ceed with. 

Less work afterwards

If you can gath­er and get start­ed on the tasks you got the respon­si­bil­i­ty to com­plete faster and eas­i­er, you will feel less frus­trat­ed while sum­ming the meet­ing up and doing any sup­ple­men­tary work that is need­ed after the meet­ing, and you will then have more time to do what you actu­al­ly need to do. 



Get your­self a method you con­sis­tent­ly use to high­light ​“this is a to-do-task”, regard­less what cir­cum­stances you are tak­ing notes in. 

Do this

1. Decide how you from now on will mark or high­light a to-do-task while tak­ing con­tin­u­ous notes. 
   
   It can for instance be: 
   • That you mark the task using a yel­low highlighter
   • That you cir­cle the task
   • That you put the task in some form of brackets
   • That you draw a star in front of the tasks
   • That you write ​“TD:” before the task, as in ​“To Do:”
2. The next time you are in a meet­ing and tak­ing notes, or the next time you are on the phone and mak­ing note of what you agree upon, mark the tasks you say you will do using the high­light­ing-method you have decid­ed to use. 
3. After the meet­ing is over or you have hung up the phone, you only need to look for your mark­ings and quick­ly add the tasks to your to-do-list in what­ev­er for­mat it is in. 

Move quick­er from promise to action

Even if you are short on time and need to dash off to the next meet­ing right away, you will be able to make sure that noth­ing gets neglect­ed or for­got­ten. It will sim­ply be eas­i­er for you to move from promis­ing to do some­thing to get­ting it done. 

What is your way?

What is your way of tak­ing note of the tasks you say you will do dur­ing a meet­ing? Write a com­ment to share your ways of working.