Wait a minute

You know its not so much taking minutes in a meeting where you have no knowledge or intelligence of the matters being discussed – it’s deciphering your jumbled jot notes and trying to compile them into coherent thoughts after the fact. What made perfect sense as I keyed stuff in Tuesday… today is complete garbage! First point I made: a change was made to the agenda. Motion to accept by so & so, seconded by so & so. Did I key in what the change was?? Oh no, I wrote that down on another piece of paper, you know, the one I threw away… Taking minutes has got to be one of the most subjective tasks out there. I mean try reading the minds of 7 execs in the room and decipher what it is they want on paper. And don’t forget – a lot of what they say they don’t actually want written down – its confidential!! Then there’s always the problem of the exec who asks you to go “get something quick” and you lose your train of thought, oh but that might happen anyway when you almost fall asleep from the sheer dryness of the subject matter. I feel like I’m back in high school and my only hope of passing, is if the teacher is in a good mood. It all stems back to a set of minutes I took about nine years ago. It was my first meeting at my new company. I was very intimidated and furiously keyed almost every single word I heard. I had pages and pages of notes – so much work to decipher. Only to have my boss say – you’re not very good at this are you. **sigh** I’ve relaxed a lot since then, I only key what I think might be important and then discard most of it. That seems to go over much better. Go figure.