I have a few dozen Inbox Collective clients that I’m working with right now. Some I talk to daily or weekly. Some I talk to once a month or once a quarter. And there are days when I’ll have five or six calls, often stacked back-to-back-to-back. When clients hop on that call, they expect me to be able to pick up exactly where we left off. They pay me too much to be disorganized or unprepared.
Part of my organizational strategy is spending an hour or two every Sunday prepping for my meetings. The other key part are my running notes.
When I’m on my call, I’ve got a notebook where I jot down notes and ideas. I find that I stay more focused if I can write things down on paper instead of trying to type up notes as we go.
And at the end of the day, I go through my notebook and type up the notes in a Google Doc designated for every client. If they’re not a client, I create a new Doc for them — often, I’ll find that a casual conversation might lead to something a few months down the road, and having those notes is a hugely valuable tool. I’ll document everything — the date, who was on the call, updates from the team, ideas we discussed, and next steps.
What it means is that over time, I’ve fully documented everything I’ve talked about and done with that client. Some teams have been with me since 2019, and I can’t always remember what we might have tried three years ago. In those cases, it’s great to be able to open up their Google Doc and search for a phrase to figure out if we might have tackled a particular issue already.
If you’re holding regular meetings with a variety of stakeholders, you might want to try the running notes system, too. Set up a doc for every team or individual you meet with, and document your notes from the day. That way, when you need to find notes from a conversation, you’re not searching in your desk for that one notepad that might have your notes, or searching through your inbox hoping to find an email that mentions the topic. You’ll have a document of exactly what you discussed, and when.
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That’s my notebook and a running notes Google Doc, both for WBUR, a client that’s worked with me for nearly three years. At this point, my Doc for them is 44 pages and more than 9,000 words long.