Making Meeting Notes work

Did anyone ever teach you how to take meeting notes? Have you ever marveled at those meeting illustrators that can capture the entire content on one giant canvas?

Like me you probably learnt by trial and error. Slowly finding what worked best for you in any given situation. Often admiring others note taking spurred you on to develop even more note taking strategies and skills. I recently ran a visual note taking lunch and learn for a group of Execs. It turned out everyone assumed I was an artists and immediately started coming out with phrases such as 'I can't draw', 'Don't laugh at my attempts' and 'good luck with teaching me to draw'.

The thing is I'm not actually an artist. 'I'm a business woman with 30 plus years experience in the corporate world and that a lot of meeting notes under my belt believe me.

Pointing out that I wasn't there to teach them to draw came as a relief. My sole intention was to both share some of the hints, tips and tricks I've picked up and encourage them to share theirs. Just as with every other part of business we need to constantly question if our current strategies are serving us well and flex accordingly. Note taking plays a really important and undervalued part of business. It helps us not only capture and record but enables us to turn those into ideas, thoughts, actions and dreams. Making our notes visual is just one strategy for aiding this process (adding images, increasing size, lettering strength, bullet points, headers, and colour). There are many more that I've learnt over the years and I'm learning more day by day thanks to the wonderful groups I work with in an attempt to improve meeting practices in general.

If you want to read more, steal some top tips or share some of you own, please feel free to take a look at my 'Meeting Madness' flipboard (link below).