Want to help your group be efficient? Write stuff down.
Want to look smart? Write stuff down.
Want to BE smart? Write stuff down.
Craig explains in this short video.
And here’s another video on this topic. It’s called Write stuff down.
This video has captions. To see them, click CC on the video screen.
Here’s what Craig says in the video
Hi everybody! Hey it’s Craig Freshley here.
I was in a meeting the other day — lots of highly paid people giving important opinions, deciding important things — and I looked around the room and I said to myself, “No one’s writing anything down!”
I was in a one-on-one conversation with somebody the other day giving instructions — pretty complicated instructions — and thinking to myself, “they’re not writing anything down! How are they going to remember this?”
And you know what? The next time I talked with that person it was clear that they hadn’t remembered, or they got wrong, the things that I had said. And that group? The next time they met they had to go over the same ground.
Meetings get a bad reputation for being inefficient and a leading cause of inefficiency is having to go over the same stuff again and again. And an easy solution to that is to write stuff down. Circulate the notes to the people who were in the meeting, check and see if what got written down matches everyone’s understanding, and don’t turn back. Let that be a reflection of the discussion or the conclusion and keep going.
When it comes to work and important conversations, I’m a writer-downer. Every phone call, every conversation, I take notes and file them away. Every meeting that I facilitate, I take notes and circulate them to the people who participated.
And here’s the magic. Writing stuff down doesn’t only prevent you from having to rehash stuff it helps you remember stuff. When I have to write stuff down it makes me a better listener.
Somebody said to me recently, “Craig you are holding so much stuff, you’re amazing!” And you know what? It’s not that I’m amazing. It’s just that I write stuff down.
I hope this helps you help your group make good decisions.
Thanks for listening everybody.
