Friday, April 4, 2008

Well, Hello Lifehacker!


By Matt & Jon:

To our surprise and delight yesterday Lifehacker featured one of our recent posts about Taking Meeting Notes on their blog. If, as a result, you found your way to The Corporate Hack and are a new subscriber, we welcome you!

The response to our post yesterday on Lifehacker was interesting. There were a bunch of folks who thought our concept of sending follow-up notes to the meeting leader was a blatant attempt to suck up. There were those who felt this practice would ultimately lead to being designated the permanent de facto note taker for all future meetings.

But there were also some great insights from readers: EricSoderberg offered that taking and distributing notes ensures that your voice gets heard, even if you tend to not speak during the meeting. EricSlaw appropriately points out that notes must be sent immediately after the meeting as he's not getting paid for his word-smithing abilities. ProlificProgrammer got a raise for taking notes and posting them to his company's internal wiki!!

Jon wanted to offer this follow-up to the post in response to the many great comments:
I was absolutely blown away by the comments we got on this post -- tons of great insight and some surprising stories of how well this method paid off. One of my favorite anecdotes on note-taking actually arose recently at lifehack.org, another great productivity blog.
Turns out one of America's greatest inventors wrote over 5 million pages of notes in his lifetime. Thomas Edison took incredibly detailed and organized notes, yet had a powerful memory with which to recall them all. Edison is proof that taking detailed and action-oriented notes, and cataloging them for easy retrieval can greatly improve your business strength and flexibility.
Now, I understand we can't spend all day slaving over pen and paper (and a lot of meetings just aren't noteworthy!), but choosing the right time to jot a few things down can really pay off. Even if you don't send the notes around, having them on hand for future reference can really save you from looking foolish or unprepared.
If you haven't had the chance to read the original post yet, Quick Tip: Meeting Notes, please do! And be sure to give us your thoughts as well - we enjoy the dialog! In the meantime, here are some other recent posts from The Hack we think you might find interesting...
Recent Posts...
GTD 101: A Brief Overview Of Getting Things Done
Action Oriented: Create Meaningful To-Do Items
Pushing Decision Making Down
Quick Tip: Subdivide Tasks For better GTD


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