"Meeting notebook" - it's not just for meetings!
I like this!
At this point, some of you might (understandably) be saying, "Um, Amanda, didn't you stop working for anyone but yourself more than 6 years ago?"
I did. Significantly more than 2000 days have passed since my last meeting, so why am I excited about a new meeting book? I loathed meetings when I had to attend them!
Well, in all honesty, I won't actually be using this meeting book for actual meetings (since I have none!). But it's also a handy project book.
The book is made by Write Notepads & Co. and is a great size - pretty much B5 at 7" x 10" (~25.5 x 17.5cm) with a sturdy cover that's smart enough for those of you still having to attend meetings in workplaces. It's spiral bound, so you can bend it right back on itself, meaning the footprint isn't huge but the available writing space is decent.
It comes pre-printed, with various fields: composer/date; a space for a title and page number; actions; notes.
It's easier to show in a photo!
The bit of me that remembers meetings can see just how handy the notebook is. I attended an interminable number of meetings when I worked at a university, and trying to make sense of notes made in the meeting when I could finally get back to them was often "challenging" shall we say. (Of course, that might have been because I spent half my time in meetings day-dreaming and planning how to leave...).
The sections at the top will allow notes to be found again easily (date; meeting title etc). There is ample space for notes taken during the meeting, but crucially, there is a separate space for noting what actions are flowing as a result of the meeting. (Unless, of course, it's academia, when meetings frequently seemed to have the sole purpose of ruining a lunch hour, but I digress...).
In all honesty, I did pay attention in some meetings, and I even took some decent notes in a few of them. The times I took the best notes in meetings was when I used "Cornell notes" style paper - where there is a lined area taking up ~3/4 of the page, a blank column for the other 1/4 and a blank space at the bottom for summary notes.
The layout of the page in these meeting notebooks is very similar, with the lined "notes" area occupying ~3/4 of the width, and the "actions" section the remaining 1/4. The notes area has numbered lines, which I can see would be very handy for linking actions to notes.
"But, but... you don't attend any meetings now, so why do you find it useful?"
Straight up, I can see just how I would use it during editing a novel - notes on what's working and what's not, with "actions" used for notes on what needs fixing, and the spaces at the top used for labelling which scene the notes relate to. I imagine that a similar use could be found during project-planning - notes on the project flowing to actions etc. Students could use it for revision notes (Cornell-style). There's a huge range of uses, so don't be put off by the "meeting notes" label.
There are 120 pages in the book and a wide range of colours for the cover.
Check one out for yourself - they're handy for so much more than meetings!
