Composition Notebook

[Ed: this snippet began its life 2012-04-26. Enjoy.]

Admin Assistant came into my office, with a question: “do you happen to remember who was at the latest meeting?””

I ask, “What day was that?”

She said: “The 19th.”

I riffle the pages of my notebook, find the page on that date that represents the meeting, and there is a meeting map1. I read off all the names that were on the page. She was fucking aghast. She had maybe half of the names.

That’s right. I keep track of that shit. And it pays off only infrequently. When it does, schweetheart, it DOES. Yup.

One of the best habits I ever learned was to keep a notebook and write notes during meetings. I use plain, unruled composition books in a fancy leather cover to class them up. Taking notes helps me to stay awake, and as I learned on multiple occasions, people would eventually rely on me to have information about certain topics discussed during a meeting. If you are not the person who is running the meeting, it does no harm to keep notes. They are wonderful reminders for remembering commitments 2 and for keeping up-to-date on the status of complex projects, or keeping oneself up-to-date on the status of multiple concurrent projects.

image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Composition_Notebook_(5736841980).jpg

  1. A meeting map is a simple sketch of the desk / table around which everyone is sitting. Sometimes, meetings begin with each person introducing themselves. As people introduce themselves, write the name of each person sitting around the table in their respective locations. Or, after one gets to know everyone, write the names in on ones own as they sit down. This isn’t my creation, yet I cannot find any online reference to it by the name I learned to call it, “Meeting Map”. ↩

  2. There is a whole set of marginalia symbols that a person can use to keep track of unfinished issues, commitments made, open loops, closed loops, unanswered questions, etc. “-“ for unfinished task, “+” for finished task, “?” for unanswered question, “[]” for open loop, “[x]” for closed loop, etc. Half the fun of marginalia is making up your own set! ↩

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