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  • Naiman Labs Newsletter #33. How I make the most of my meeting notes

Naiman Labs Newsletter #33. How I make the most of my meeting notes

Hi friends! Welcome to the Naiman Labs newsletter!

The Naiman Labs newsletter is the space where we discuss careers and productivity.

Having worked in HR (I prefer to call this function People & Culture), I've always taken notes.

During my time as a recruiter, I conducted numerous interviews with candidates and needed to gather the right information about them in a way that I could quickly find the relevant information for my clients and to match candidates with relevant job openings.

When I worked as a consultant, client interviews were a primary source of insights for each project. Hence, meticulous collection of information was crucial to ensure that I could extract maximum value within a short timeframe. Imagine working with a client, conducting an interviews with the CEO or CPO, only to realize later that you missed capturing valuable information. Can you imagine how inconvenient and unprofessional it might be to go and ask CEO for another hour of their time because you were not attentive enough?

Now, as a business partner, I spend around 50% of my time in team meetings, which I consider a vital aspect of my role.

I regularly hold one-on-one meetings with team leaders and team members to understand if everything is alright with the team’s well-being, engagement, and performance. These meetings provide valuable insights into pressing issues and opportunities. Moreover, they serve as an excellent platform to establish trust with the team and enhance my understanding of them.

I also have group sessions and meetings where we brainstorm, provide updates on the projects. Additionally, I conduct group brainstorming sessions and workshops where I act as a moderator and facilitator. So I need to maintain group dynamics and to guide the team towards session goals effectively.

Outside of my primary role, I engage in career coaching and consulting sessions, requiring attentive listening and precise questioning.

So as you can see, meetings is a huge part of my daily work. Over time, I've identified several crucial aspects of effective meeting notes:

  1. Ease of Note-Taking: Notes should be effortless and quick to jot down. It's essential to minimize friction in starting the writing process. When engaged in lively discussions, you must capture notes rapidly without diverting your attention from the conversation.

  2. Actionability. Notes should be actionable. Conversations are amazing source of insights for my work. Therefore I always need to be able to identify actionable follow-ups.

  3. Clarity. Notes should be clean and explicit. A note like "Gathering August 2021" lacks value after a few days. Therefore, the information you record must be concise and readily understandable even days after the meeting.

  4. Accessibility. Meeting notes should be easy to find when you need them. If you can’t find the notes when you need them you can consider this information as lost.

I found several important hacks helping me with the notes.

I've come across several techniques that significantly improve my note-taking process and help me to increase the value of my meeting notes:

📃 Single page. For regular meetings (like weekly one-on-ones or daily team meetings), it's useful to maintain a single document dedicated to the meeting type, organized by dates as subheadings.

This is how it looks like in my Bear Notes:

This is always helpful, because you can see the history of your conversations at the single page.

🛠️ Templates. They're especially handy for structured discussions beyond one-on-ones. That’s why it is good to have interview guides, or set of questions as a template for your note. If you are a little bit more structural and disciplined person than me, you can even use the templates for your 1-1 meetings, or regular team updates. During my time in recruitment, we utilized an interview book—a collection of templated pages featuring sections for various interview aspects (candidate's name, strengths, weaknesses, main talking points, red flags, etc.).

You can create a note template in Notion, in Evernote and in many other note-taking apps you find appealing. Developing meeting notes templates can save significant time and effort in the long run.

📂 Organising. This is another thing I find very important. When it is done right it increases the value of your notes significantly, because you can easy find them when you need them. I've experimented with various approaches, from dedicated notebooks for specific meeting types to interconnected databases in Notion. Currently, I follow these principles:

  1. I categorize my notes (both personal and meeting-related) by work areas (streams) and projects. E.g. I work with Engineering and Product Management teams, so I have "Engineering" and "Product" folders.

  2. I also organise my notes by “type”. For example I have tags for my “1-1s”, and my group “meetings”. It goes in a way against PARA method, described by Tiago Forte that I find very useful, however I can see a lot of value to have these data about note types. It goes well with my workflow. Sometimes I need to look through all my 1-1 meetings within a team to see if I can find some trends and some repeated topics.

Notes structured by meeting types

Notes structured by Workstreams

That is why my main note-taking app is Bear Notes. It is very easy to organise notes by using multiple tags. So for every note a have a Stream tag and a Type tag. That works for me, but you can apply this in almost every note taking app: Evernote, UpNote, Notion and even Apple Notes.

  1. Review. I have already published a newsletter about the power of review and you can read it here. Review is one of the most powerful habits I implemented in my workflow. I don’t overengineer it. I dedicate 30 minutes every Friday to review my notes from the week. During this process, I identify upcoming tasks, significant problems needing further investigation, or essential pieces of information. It also helps me prioritise my efforts. Reviewing my notes increases their value significantly. It is absolutely helpful because these meeting notes are one of the most valuable information source for me.

🎁 Wrapping up:

  1. I structure my meeting notes by areas (workstreams) and related projects - this makes it very easy to find them when I need them

  2. I make templates for my notes when I have more complex meeting structure compared to 1-1 meeting.

  3. I also organise my notes by “type”.

  4. I regularly review my meeting notes to identify tasks, ideas and trends based on my conversations.

My note-taking toolkit:

  • Bear notes (for meeting notes, ideas and 1-1s)

  • Notion (for writing, templates and brainstorming)

That's all for today. This is my straightforward approach to meeting notes. Feel free to try these methods and adapt them to your workflow for a more productive week ahead. Capture information effectively and make the most of it! 😉

Additional reading I recommend:

PARA Method by Tiago Forte: https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/