Do you take too many notes during meetings and find them difficult to action afterwards? Or maybe you forget to take notes and miss important points? Try these four tips on how to write meeting minutes.
Use shorthand
Make your meeting minutes as simple as possible so you can spend more time listening and engaging in the meeting. Use symbols and abbreviations to save yourself time. Using initials to represent people will save you from writing their names over and over. You could also try different coloured pens to categorize speakers or topics.
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Use a meeting minute’s template
Using a template is another handy way to save time. You can use an online meeting tool to set up a web-based template or create a basic form and print hard copies ahead of time.
Ensure that your template includes all the basic information: the date and time of your meeting, names of attendees and the reason for the meeting. Add notes as you go including the topics discussed, decisions made, questions answered and any important points you may need to reference later.
Any questions or tasks that need to be followed-up on should be included as well. Take some time to mark these clearly before leaving the room, so you can quickly delegate or action them afterwards.
Use visual notes
Visual notes are easy to follow and understand, and can be quicker to take. Using white space, colours, borders, arrows and symbols, you can create a visual map of your meeting. This method highlights only the most important points, avoiding long lists of useless text. It also happens to be a lot more fun.
Mike Rohde’s sketch notes blog is a great place to see examples of visual note taking methods. He also has some helpful pictures on Flickr that explain the basics of his process and how to get started.
Follow-up
Quick follow-up will make your meeting minutes more useful. Review your notes before leaving the room to highlight everything you need to action: calls to make, emails to send, appointments or deadlines to add to your calendar and tasks to complete.
If you are responsible for sending copies to other team members, ensure this is done as soon as possible, while the meeting is still fresh in their minds. Make any tasks, questions and deadlines clear for others to see and include only relevant information.
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*It helps you create an agenda, it even adds tasks from the previous meeting(s)to the agenda
*During the meeting you write short bullets and save them as a note, decision or task
*To structure your meeting you can load a standard template or create your own
*In the minutes you Notes, Decisions and Tasks have different colors
*At the end of the meeting you can email the minutes with one click
*Tasks are automatically emailed to the owner
*Personal task list will remind you of what you need to do and what others need to do.
*What do you find to makes your meeting minutes more useful?
Leave us a comment with your tips below.
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