Meeting Minutes–the why and what of it!

Often, I find myself in meetings where I’m the only one taking notes. It surprise me to no end to find that people are comfortable with this. Note taking is such an important activity in my daily life. I make an effort to take notes in a meeting or generally insist the one of the participants does that.

Why? And how? What to use?

For the why and what… here’s a great article that talks about meeting minutes. After looking through some top hits on bing, I settled on this one:
https://www.businesswritingblog.com/business_writing/2006/01/tips_for_writin.html

As to how – I often carry my laptop and these days with my Lenovo 510, I have over 3 hours of battery life, which means it lasts longer than the meeting So note taking is certainly a pleasure using OneNote and then to turn that into an email is generally effortless. The good thing about electronic notes:

• They’re easy to send out
• Easier to search
• Easier to edit and fix up
• Filing and organizing is no pain

OneNote is the app I use. Search comes in handy, but I’m terrible at filing at this time. Need to improve this function and secondly how often I refer to my notes. I generally have a good memory, so notes are great for triggering my memories of the meeting.

Other times when I choose not to carry a laptop, I carry a notebook – preferably my trusty black notebook (can’t recall the brand right now) – it’s got these pages which you can shuffle around as needed, so you can keep things organized. Otherwise I’d go for a mini folder where I can reorganize the papers easily.