A recent survey I conducted showed that nearly a third of professionals had stopped taking notes in meetings.
The reasons they described were:
- They were distracting
- They damaged and interrupted the conversation
- They stopped people from listening properly
- They weren’t valuable afterwards
I experienced the same thing. Originally, I didn’t take notes, then I started, and then I stopped again for the same reasons outlined above.
But then I developed an advanced way of taking notes that made the meeting and conversation more productive, not less. It helped structure the meeting and ensured we didn’t miss anything important. It saved time because we didn’t have to setup secondary meetings to come back to things we’d forgotten to cover.
This video is Lesson 10 from my Key Skills programme. It refers to “MELTWHEN” which is a series of eight questions that take a symptom of a problem through to a fully defined and qualified problem/pain. It is taught in the Foundations course and might be confusing if you’re jumping straight in at this point.