How Do You Meeting Prep and Take Notes?

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00:00:04.720 | Hi, Cal.

00:00:05.320 | My name is Jeff.

00:00:06.280 | I work as a chief of staff in the R&D org

00:00:09.320 | at a large tech firm.

00:00:11.400 | In my role, I take many, many meetings each week

00:00:14.480 | with a wide range of stakeholder teams and individuals

00:00:17.720 | and leads.

00:00:19.520 | Many of these meetings recur over time,

00:00:21.480 | so I maintain agenda documents to help

00:00:23.680 | me come to those meetings prepared, capture notes,

00:00:26.680 | as well as action items.

00:00:28.480 | Ultimately, this adds up to a pretty decent amount

00:00:30.720 | of overhead, and I'm not sure it's an optimal way

00:00:33.240 | to approach agendas and notes for future reference

00:00:35.960 | and the capturing of action items

00:00:37.880 | that eventually flow into my main system.

00:00:40.840 | I'd love any thoughts you have on how you approach meeting

00:00:43.440 | prep, how you capture notes or decide whether notes are worth

00:00:46.960 | capturing over time, and any takeaways when

00:00:50.480 | you work with so many different collaborating teams

00:00:52.640 | and stakeholders.

00:00:54.080 | Thanks so much for the podcast and all the terrific books

00:00:56.440 | and articles that you've authored over the years.

00:00:58.520 | They've been both inspirational and a really big help

00:01:00.800 | to me personally.

00:01:03.400 | Well, when it comes to a meeting-heavy schedule,

00:01:07.240 | I tend to believe that processing is actually

00:01:11.000 | a more important and more efficient way of making

00:01:14.080 | sense of meetings than prep.

00:01:16.600 | So let's put these two things in the contrast.

00:01:18.800 | Prep is about what you do in advance.

00:01:21.240 | Let's put together these agenda documents.

00:01:23.280 | Let's have all the information, this document.

00:01:25.320 | We can then be the place where the notes ultimately reside,

00:01:29.360 | et cetera.

00:01:30.080 | Let's make sure that we come into the meetings

00:01:31.400 | and what we're going to talk about.

00:01:32.280 | That's important.

00:01:33.440 | But we often, I think, neglect the time

00:01:36.640 | after the meeting to make sense of everything that happened.

00:01:40.680 | And so to me, if you had to choose just one thing

00:01:43.040 | to add to your meeting schedule to help keep your arms around

00:01:46.480 | all of these things, it would be this rule

00:01:48.360 | that I've talked about often that when you schedule

00:01:51.960 | a meeting, as part of that meeting,

00:01:54.360 | you schedule immediately after it time for processing it.

00:01:58.600 | And that goes right on your calendar,

00:02:00.120 | so that time is now captured.

00:02:01.480 | So if you have a meeting from 1 to 1:30,

00:02:04.880 | you schedule 1 to 1:45.

00:02:07.000 | And you delineate on your calendar 1:30 to 1:45

00:02:09.720 | is for processing.

00:02:10.560 | So now that time is taken.

00:02:11.600 | No one can take that with another meeting.

00:02:13.360 | You're not available to 1:45.

00:02:15.280 | Now, in that processing time, you

00:02:16.640 | say, I need to close every single loop that

00:02:18.720 | was opened in this meeting.

00:02:21.720 | Now you're flexible.

00:02:23.360 | Some meetings, you just need to get things

00:02:25.160 | into your existing systems.

00:02:26.880 | You don't need an extra infrastructure here

00:02:29.280 | of shared agenda documents where notes and tasks go.

00:02:31.800 | Because I'll tell you what, the other people

00:02:33.680 | aren't going to look at them.

00:02:35.360 | Unless they work for you and you force them,

00:02:36.680 | they're not going to look at those things.

00:02:37.760 | So you might just be putting this into your systems.

00:02:40.160 | Reminder on my calendar, a task in my task list,

00:02:42.960 | update my weekly plan, et cetera.

00:02:46.560 | When you do have systems, maybe there's

00:02:48.360 | particular types of meetings that happen recurringly,

00:02:50.960 | and you have some sort of task board

00:02:52.500 | for keeping track of what's going on with this project.

00:02:54.760 | That's fine.

00:02:55.260 | You can update those systems then

00:02:57.200 | after that meeting is done.

00:02:59.040 | So prep is important.

00:03:01.040 | And I think we put a lot of attention on prep.

00:03:04.120 | We hear a lot of stories like Bezos at Amazon

00:03:06.760 | requiring you to write these really to-the-point memos

00:03:11.280 | before he will attend a meeting where it's incredibly clear,

00:03:14.120 | this is what this meeting is about.

00:03:15.880 | This is why we need to have a meeting here,

00:03:17.680 | the decisions that need to be made.

00:03:19.020 | Here's all the relevant information

00:03:20.320 | that you can read beforehand.

00:03:21.600 | I think that's all great, and where that's relevant, do that.

00:03:24.060 | But we don't spend nearly enough time

00:03:25.600 | on how do you close those loops.

00:03:27.480 | Because the thing that's going to kill you

00:03:29.240 | is if you go from meeting to meeting to meeting,

00:03:32.000 | don't get a close to loop from one before you start the next.

00:03:36.120 | It all piles up, and it becomes very stressful and very anxiety

00:03:40.000 | producing.

00:03:41.040 | And you lose things, and they get jumbled,

00:03:42.940 | and your energy gets lost, and your effectiveness

00:03:45.280 | as an executive is going to plummet.

00:03:48.040 | So remember, a meeting has two parts.

00:03:51.000 | The part that everyone knows about,

00:03:52.640 | because everyone's in the same space

00:03:54.280 | for a certain period of time, and the part that immediately

00:03:57.160 | follows, where you are by yourself making sense

00:04:00.360 | of everything that was just discussed.

00:04:02.120 | Don't neglect that second part.

00:04:03.400 | I think you're going to find that you're

00:04:05.040 | able to handle these meetings with much more

00:04:07.240 | cognitive agility.

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00:04:12.640 | (upbeat music)

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How Do You Meeting Prep and Take Notes?

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