Throwing away…..
I am currently coaching a particularly creative person who generates ideas continually. He needs GTD specifically because he creates stuff that he could move on, meetings he could go to, initiatives to pursue more quickly than any of the standard strategies that people use to handle their lives can cope with.
One particular kind of “stuff” that accumulates in his life is meeting notes. He has many pages of them and it has become a goal of mine to have him throw them away. This is because in my own personal experience, trashing your meeting notes after you have processed them into your GTD system is the an act of faith. The first time you do it there is always a wince, a little qualm… Have I truly captured all the projects and actions we discussed? Did I miss some important note or outcome?
Trashing your notes forces you to be
(1) rigorous about sucking every last commitment and next action out of the notes and
(2) utterly dependant on looking at your lists in order to know what to do.
It could be entirely legitimate to keep your notes of course – there could be a whole mind-map on there that deserves a place in your reference material or project support folders. That will happen sometimes, but often you will be able to boil the whole meeting (for you) down to a couple of projects and half-a-dozen next actions and waiting-fors. Better yet, knowing that you are going to faithfully process the meeting into your trusted GTD system will make you alert during the meeting to promises made to you (waiting-fors) and commitments you make to others (projects, next actions). You will automatically chase down the information you need to make a concrete commitment and to get clarity about what other people are going to do for you.
This attitude to meetings is now so ingrained in me that I actually work as a facilitator in meetings, where I use structured questioning to help everyone get that kind of clarity.
My challenge to you, as it was to my client: after your next meeting, tear out the sheet with your notes on it, process it out of your inbox and throw it away!
P.S This whole post was one Pomodori!
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I usually don’t even take notes during meetings. If things come up that I need to track, I enter them in my GTD system right away (next action, waiting for, etc.)
Should I need to keep something I wrote during the meeting, it’s probably some Reference material that get filed in the proper folder.
@stampf Thanks for the input. I generally cannot put things straight into my system – I use Outlook for my tasks so it would require typing and take my attention away from the conversation. I also find it helpful to collect things (often as a mindmap) in a raw associative form and do the processing in a seperate step.
I do find it very useful to do processing in meetings when things are too vague: then you need to clarify who is going to what and when.