I’ve just started reading The Back of the Napkin which is apparently about Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, I’m interested in how this can improve my effectiveness so before I get too far with the book I thought it might be worth documenting what I have so far. Basically a personal short hand for taking notes. Not exactly a visual vocabulary for sure but it will be interesting to contrast this with where I end up after reading the book.

Like most people, this has evolved over time for taking notes in meetings, training, when reading, etc. I first noted this down when I covered it in some training I did on effective meetings a long time ago. The image below shows the key aspects of my key for note taking, mostly applicable to meetings. The key objective, of course, is to make sure I end up with a record of who, will do what, by when and also note informational items. All done in such a way that it’s easily extracted later (consistency being key here).

The key then looks like this…

An example of this in use might look like this…

The third and final part of the Meeting Basics SlideShare series is now up and can be viewed below.  You can view the others in the series here.

You can also download a PDF onepager, that supplements the slideshow.

The second in my SlideShare series Meeting Basics is Running a Meeting and can be viewed below.

It has been an interesting exercise for me in using SlideShare to present information, your thoughts, as ever, are welcome. You can view the others in the series here.

You can also download a PDF onepager, that supplements the slideshow.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of having meetings with some people who for various reasons exist outside of the corporate world and meeting culture. There were some real joys in this, the energy in a group when they meet because they’re all excited about a common goal is very different to what you usually see in a work environment. There were some frustrations too in working with some people not used to meetings.

At same time I’ve been experimenting with SlideShare and enjoyed hugely Brain Rules For Presenters which is introduces some of the concepts from Brain Rules, which I’m anxious to read.

This lead almost inveitably to the idea of trying to present some Meeting Basics information using SlideShare. The slideshow is the first in a series of three Meeting Basics.

You can also download a PDF onepager, that supplements the slideshow.