I’m a note taker. Notes will be taken during every meeting; every impromptu conversation; every where and at any time. I take notes for a couple reasons. First, GTD suggests that anything that can be written down should be written down. And, second my memory is really pretty poor.
On average, I take two types of notes. The first time are pretty valuable and the second are almost always a complete waste of effort.
My first set of notes are those from interviews and meetings. Starting at LBS and continuing at Infosys these notes are valuable resources for documenting good information and next actions.
The second set of notes are those that I draft to ‘myself.’ These can be anything from bright ideas to next actions. Now-a-days these types of personal notes are almost always a signal that I’m overwhelmed. See, I just don’t write the note – process meeting with partner note – once. Oh now, I’ll write the damn thing five different times in different places.
Yesterday, I started really doing due diligence on our business plan. The day was full of reading industry reports and getting some type of skeleton plan in place for moving the project forward. Today, I’m going through old notes processing those in my little Moleskin and deleting all the BS ‘to myself’ notes that have accumulated over the last year. Sadly, there’s far more of the latter than the former.
I will judiciously use the save and delete buttons today.
