Guest Post: Using your Filofax to hold more effective meetings - Planning with Printed Portal

Thank you to Cori from Planning with Printed Portal for this guest post. 

Do you take your planner to meetings?

I frequently take my A5 work binder into ad hoc meetings and to Committee Meetings. This is because it already contains my schedule and usually it will also contain a lot of the information that I might need to call upon or refer to in my meetings. After all, I use my Filofax to do my meeting preparation and my Filofax is likely to already contain my meeting notes from my previous meeting.

In this post I am share a few key Meetings Pages in my current work Filofax.

Meeting Preparation

My meeting preparation varies depending upon my role in the specific meeting I am preparing for. For example I might be organising the meeting and will be required to prepare the agenda and the invite. Alternatively I might simply just need to attend the meeting. If this is the case I simply need to make sure I know my stuff and note down any other business.

Meeting Attendance

The next stage is attendance at meetings. To have an effective meeting hopefully you will only be attending a meeting if you are actually required to do so.

I try to limit my own personal notes in a meeting to two side of A5. This of course depends on the length of the meeting, but unless you are the secretary (or otherwise tasked with taking comprehensive notes) you should be as concise as possible.

To make meeting notes as concise as possible I also use and keep track of key recurring points and a list of abbreviations and acronyms.

Post-Meeting

After the meeting it is important that you follow up correctly and take the time to review the meeting.

This should include creating an actionable to-do list of follow up actions which you can either start in the meeting or as soon as you get out of the meeting based on your notes.  Mine usually looks like this:

This page can then be used in the usual way – i.e. scribbled on, highlighted and ticked off as you would do with your normal to do list.

Printed Portal are currently seeking funding for their Meeting Notebooks Collection which include multiple tiers suitable for Filofax and other A5 planner users (starting at £1) and gives you an opportunity to get your hands on a range of planner inserts including the ones featured in the photos above designed to help you have more effective meetings. 

Find out more on their Kickstarter page.