FOCUS PLANNER PRO TIP: KEEP TRACK OF THOSE MEETING NOTES!

Focus Planner Pro Tip: Keep Track of Those Meeting Notes!

You don’t have to use the Focus Planner to take advantage of this great tip. You can be using any journal or notebook, really. If you have the Focus Planner, you know that there are blank pages in the back third of the book so that you can take it to meetings, make notes, get creative, brainstorm…. Really to do anything you like.

We find that MOST people use it to take to meetings so that they can use one diary for focus, balance, productivity AND meeting notes. That way their Focus Planner becomes their sidekick at all times, and it helps them build the habits they want.

One tricky thing is to remember where all those meeting notes are! Our favourite method is to create certain ‘collections’ for different things in our blank pages… and the ‘Meeting Collection’ is out most used species.

Starting a Meeting Collection in Your Journal

When we begin a new Focus Planner, the first thing we do is turn to the blank pages and set up our collections, and our Index. 

To start, we number all of the pages in our blank pages in the bottom corners – left bottom corner for the left pages and right bottom corner for the right hand side pages (confession – we usually only do the first 30 or so pages before we get bored….. but we always regret it later on!).

Then we pick 14 of those pages and make a heading on them that simply says ‘Meetings.’ Sounds simple, huh? This way all of our meeting notes in bunched together in the same section of the planner or journal.

Now when we go a meeting, we simply use one of those blank pages. We write the meeting title, date and attendees at the top and we get writing.

Keeping Track of What’s Where

Here’s the pro tip for extra credit. In the very first of our blank pages, we write a heading ‘Index’ – and in this case, we would write the following: ‘Meetings: 2-16’. This signifies that our meeting notes are on pages 2-16 of the blank pages. When we need our notes, we just flick through the pages until we get to the right number. Glad you wrote those pages numbers down now? 

Here are some nuances:

If the meeting notes are particularly important – we give them their own line on the ‘Index’ page. For instance, it might say ‘Trucorp Meeting: 8’ (meaning the notes from the Trucorp meeting are on page 8).

If we need more meeting pages than we’ve allocated – simple, we just find another cluster of blank pages and write ‘Meeting’ at the top again. We then amend our Index so that now it says ‘Meetings: 2-16, 24-28 ‘or something similar.

Other Collections:

We use this ‘collections’ method for projects, budgets and other things throughout the year. If there is a certain project we are working on, we write the heading on a couple of pages and keep all our notes and thoughts there. The Index will reflect this: ‘ABC Project: 18-20’

This is so simple to do and yet keeps us incredibly organised. If you have different methods of doing this for yourself, we’d love to hear about it.