Why I exclusively take notes on a whiteboard

I visualise everything. All the time. If I’m in a client meeting, I take notes with virtual post-its. If I’m having an internal discussion about ways we can do things better, or more efficiently in-house, I put it on a whiteboard. Even last week, my colleague and buddy Abimbola Ilori said “Of course you have a Lucid for this!” (a phrase which I love btw). And it made me think about ‘Why?’… why do I document all this stuff on a whiteboard?

Well firstly it’s because I’m a visual thinker… I don’t like to document things in a linear fashion. If I write a list of things, I invariably miss something and have to go back, and delete or insert things after the fact. Also, when documenting in a linear fashion it means I have to slow my thinking to make sure I’ve captured everything on a given topic before I continue with the list. So using a whiteboard gives me the flexibility to get down all my thoughts (without over-thinking) and then organise ideas on the fly.

"Pictures are easier for our brains to comprehend than words. The?picture superiority effect?ensures we remember graphical information more readily than anything that we read.” - Kymberly Fergusson, Draw.io

But I don’t think that’s the main reason. How many times have you been to a meeting where things are discussed and then the actions or ideas kinda disappear? Then, unless an action has been specifically called out, everyone leaves and gets on with their lives. The meeting outcomes are lost, and more importantly so is the momentum.

It’s not anyones faulty per se, usually it’s time constraints or knowing who ‘owns’ the work to take it forward. Sometimes it just takes longer to get going with a task in the first place, “Starting is the hardest part”… meaning once you actually get into a task, it’s easier to keep going. Until you start the task, it’s really just a theoretical idea of ‘something that might be done’.

“Sometimes a task seems too overwhelming and that you don’t know where to start. So you don’t. The best way to combat being overwhelmed is to the break the task down into tiny, bite size pieces.” - Jacqueline Sinfield, Untappedbrilliance.com

So I think my need to document on-the-fly is as much about getting over that ‘Starting’ hurdle as early as possible, getting that early view of the 'bite sized pieces'. If I can leave a meeting or discussion with the core ideas and actions already on a board, then we can see what has been discussed, correct anything I may have misunderstood (or attributed to the wrong topic), and we can all go away to focus on ‘doing the thing’ rather than trying to remember what we just talked about. Getting over that post-meeting hurdle right away.

That said, you still need to establish task owners and define actions - but the visual approach makes it much clearer. If tasks are left by themselves, without someone to take them forward, then you have a tool to go back to and can reference that collective notepad after the fact.

What techniques do you use to get going on a task or activity that (at first) seems a little daunting? Are there tools you use to reduce the amount of 'post-meeting' admin?