Speaker 1: There are three main reasons the note-taking technique you use for work needs to be very different from the way you take notes for personal or academic use. Number one, often the company you work for has limitations on what apps you can use for note-taking purposes. If you work at Microsoft, you're probably not gonna be able to use Notion no matter how many nice features it has. Number two, you're usually under a lot of time pressure to take accurate notes in one go. So it's not like you can ask your colleagues, clients to slow down or repeat everything they just said after the meeting. And finally, in today's interconnected world, the nature of note-taking is now inherently collaborative. The notes you take have to be easily shareable so that others can provide feedback as quickly as possible. In this video, I share the note-taking technique I developed specifically for work over the past seven years, first as a management consultant and now as a product marketer at a large tech company, then share templates and examples of the products you can use right away. Let's get started. Hi friends, welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Jeff and as a product marketer, I work with a multitude of external clients and internal teams on a daily basis. Project management is an essential part of my job of which effective note-taking is a core component. Just think about the ideal scenario at the end of a business meeting or any team project. Every single attendee should understand the main takeaways and more importantly, the specific action items they need to take as a next step. With this premise in mind, the most effective note-taking techniques for professionals should always be action oriented because that's how we drive the project forward. That's how work gets done. While many YouTube videos do a phenomenal job at breaking down note-taking techniques for personal use or for school, that's more geared towards capturing and resurfacing information as opposed to summarizing key takeaways and action items. At work, I currently use three different note-taking templates based on the specific situation that I'm in. First, meeting notes for myself. Second, team meeting notes where only one team is involved. And third, cross-functional team meetings where there are multiple teams present. As you'll soon see, I use different templates because the dynamics of those three situations are inherently different. And although I use Google Docs and Google Sheets, you can adapt my note-taking technique to really any application used for capturing text. Starting with a notes template that is very creatively named Notes for Self. This is probably the default note-taking setup we are most familiar with. And it does work very well when we ourselves are the primary audience. Diving right in. I split this first page into three different sections. The first part, Key Links. This is where I hyperlink to folders and documents I'm currently working on. And this part should be updated as new projects are launched and completed ones are archived. This next section, I like to call it top of mind because I'm usually working on four to five different work streams at once. And this allows me to prioritize my action items in the short to mid term. I particularly like the outstanding questions prompt here because when I think about next steps, I realize often there are things I need to figure out before I can take that next step. So I note down those questions here. And this last part is just a notes template. I copy and paste every time I start taking a new note. Oh, and pro tip. If you see the numbering is a little weird here, you can actually just right click, restart numbering, press okay, and everything should be fixed. Onto actually how I take the notes. In this fun, but unfortunately fictional example, I'm having a meeting with Satya on Q3 planning. Before the meeting even takes place, I make sure to have the date, the topic, and the person I'm meeting with all typed out beforehand. I would actually list also the objective of this meeting, no matter how obvious it may be, to make sure I don't let the conversation go off topic. I might even include some questions here that I wanna ask in the meeting as prompts to myself. And then during the meeting, I would simply type out all the notes in a simple bullet point format. After the meeting, I would usually spend five to 10 minutes to summarize my notes in the key takeaway section here. So I can quickly review the highlights if I need to down the line. And usually I would send the key takeaways in a follow-up email to whoever I was meeting with, just so we're all on the same page. As you can see, nothing revolutionary here, but it doesn't have to be. As long as the main user of this note-taking template is ourselves, it would work in a variety of different situations. If I were shadowing a sales call, if I were being briefed by an external agency on upcoming campaign launch, if I were having a coffee chat with a manager from another team, if I were thinking about switching teams, which I would never do that. If you're enjoying this video so far, please let me know by tapping that like button and let me know in the comments if this is similar to what you're already doing at work. Now, this next team meeting notes template, where only one team is involved is where it starts to get really interesting. As you can see, I'm using Google Sheets instead of Docs, and there are very good reasons for this change. Number one, since there are now multiple contributors to the meeting notes, the formatting of the app needs to allow for this. For example, for this May 3rd meeting, Tim wants to debrief everyone on Apple's successful Spring Loaded event, and Warren wants to share his investment strategy. Now, because these two are on different rows, it's very clear to us that these are two separate topics. Who is gonna share what, the estimated time they're gonna take, and any links to external documents or websites that they want other people to reference beforehand. Number two, as these sharings are taking place, it's best practice to have one person be responsible for taking notes each meeting, and I usually write that person's name to the left-hand side here. For the team that I'm in, we have a rotational setup, so we have a different person taking notes each week. Yes, it's a little awkward to take notes all one cell here, but I think it's worth it because the presenters should have the main takeaways prepared beforehand, making the note-taking a little bit easier. And the action items are gonna be super clear because they're highlighted in a completely separate column. So, how do you actually use this template? Let's say this week is over and someone has a topic to discuss next week. Well, they'll first just highlight the header row and the row right below it, press Command-C to copy. With the top empty row highlighted, Command-Option-Plus a couple of times to add a few empty rows, and Command-V to paste the two rows with the exact same formatting so it looks clean and consistent. I can simply delete the content now, change a date to next week, and add the person whose turn it is to take notes. Let's say it's Tim. The agenda is, I don't know, Tesla and Apple hybrid car discussion. This is clearly a joke. Please don't sue me. The owner is me because it's my topic. The time needed, 15 minutes. And let's say someone wants to add a topic below mine. Very simple. Highlighting the empty row below mine, they will just press Command-Option-Plus to add another row. If you see the formatting is a little weird here, no problem. You can simply, with this highlighted across the board, go down one, Command-D, to paste all the formatting down one row, and then just simply delete the content. Now the formatting should be fine. And no, for the last time, I don't know why people keep saying this, I am totally not a control freak. Moving on to the notes template for meetings with multiple teams. And again, the layout and setup is gonna be slightly different. So every Monday, the product marketing team, which is the team that I'm on, would have meetings with these three different teams, product sales and specialists, separately, because there's a lot of content to cover. At the same time, there's a lot of synergy among the four teams, right? That's why it's best to let each team see what's going on with the other teams when we're taking the notes. And that's why we have three teams worth of notes on the same tab. Operationally, the POCs from each team would be responsible for inputting the agenda items before the meetings. And marketing would be responsible for taking down the notes and summarizing action items because we are the ones calling for and leading these meetings. If you wanted to add a new section for next week, it would be similar to the process before. Simply add a bunch of empty rows up here, copy and paste it over, delete any unnecessary rows, update the date. And yes, it can be a little annoying to have to, you know, empty and delete the content inside the cells. But again, in my personal opinion, this trade-off is definitely worth having all the cross-functional team meeting notes in one tab. All three of these templates are linked down in the description below, but I do hope the main takeaway for you is the thought process and rationale that went into this note-taking technique. It's not perfect, but I can easily see this working for OneNote, Evernote, Notion, and many other apps. Let me know in the comments if you end up using this method for taking notes at work. And check out this playlist over here for more productivity tips and tricks. See you on the next video. And in the meantime, have a great one.