The Win: Make your meetings, phone calls, Skype calls massively more productive. Keep track of what is decided during meetings, phone calls, Skype calls. Easily create tasks and assign them to members of your team.
The Problem: During a call, it’s easy to make decisions, plan the next move, come up with a brilliant strategy. Everybody agrees on the next few steps. Some may take notes. But often the details are forgotten, nobody takes action afterwards and the meeting ends up being an unproductive waste of time that doesn’t move things forward.
A possible solution: After several years I think I’ve found a good solution that I’d like to share with you.
It all starts with me creating a Trello card for that particular meeting. This is already really useful because it goes in my calendar and reminds me that the meeting will take place. I then use 3 checklists:
Agenda
Comments
Actions
The agenda I fill in ahead of time, so that there is a clear list of topics to cover. Items get ticked off as the call progresses. Sometimes someone has another idea, it gets added to the end of the agenda.
You can assign people attending the meeting.
In the comments, I make quick notes of the things that were said.
In the actions, I make specific notes of things that need to be done as a result of the meeting.
After the call is finished, I take a few minutes to look over what I’ve written. It’s written in a hurry, so spelling / grammar needs adjusting + put into plain English. I then tick off each comment as I write it up properly.
The Action points are converted into cards, assigned to team members and moved to the appropriate board.
I then @mention everybody who attended in a comment, “Here are the notes from today’s meeting, I converted the action points into separate cards on the appropriate board.”
The result: Minimum overheads using existing tools. The notes practically write themselves. Specific actions are recorded and created in a way that makes sure they will get done.
