Last week I had a short chat with a personal assistant. She incidentally mentioned she was still occupied making minutes of last week’s management team meeting.
That came as a surprise to me: Was that really the highest and best use of her time?
Unless needed for legal reasons, making extended meeting notes is usually an enormous waste of time.
A much better approach is to make an action-decision-communication log at the end of each meeting.
- An action log is an overview of commitments from the participants attending the meeting. It describes what the action is, who will take the action, and when it’s finished.
- A decision log is an overview of all key decisions made at the meeting.
- A communication log describes who needs to know what after the meeting has taken place.
An action-decision-communication log will help you to avoid unnecessary work and streamline your organization: Don’t waste time by making minutes