Using Drafts 5 at Work
I have many meetings that I go to in any given day. One of the things that I’d been struggling with was being able to keep track of what I needed to do after a meeting and/or documenting certain types of meetings more effectively.
I have been using a Workflow I created a couple of years ago to get the pertinent details of a meeting into Drafts. I spoke about updating that workflow to incorporate drafts 5 here.
Once I was able to get the information into Drafts 5 a new opportunity arose. I was able to run a Workflow in Drafts!
I decided that getting the information into Drafts was great, but I needed a good way to get it out.
There were two sections in the Draft that I decided I could leverage to help:
- Actions
- Notes
Broadly speaking there are 3 types of meetings I go to:
- Daily Standup aka Scrum
- One-on-One with direct reports or my manager
- General Meetings
Categorizing the meetings helped me to create Draft Actions that run Workflows for each meeting type.
Scrum
This workflow runs through the Actions of the Draft and adds each one to OmniFocus in a Project called Scrum with a Tag of Work. The due date set for these tasks is noon of the same day. My goal is to have the items that come from Scrum totally processed by noon of that day and for 80% of them I can. Some actions are more involved, but having them in OmniFocus helps me to make sure that they get taken care of.
It also creates a calendar meeting for the next business day with my Scrum template and lets me know which team member will start that next day.
One-on-One
This workflow runs similarly to the Scrum workflow. It adds the Action items to OmniFocus with a due date of noon the same day, tagged with Work and in the One-on-One Project.
Instead of creating a calendar meeting for the next business day at 8:30 it appends items from the Notes section to a Dropbox file. The Dropbox path is predefined, but the name of the file matches the name of the person I met with (luckily I don’t have 2 Tom’s reporting to me).
General Meetings
This is the simplest workflow. It adds all of the items under actions to OmniFocus with a due date of noon, project of Meeting Follow Up and Tag of Work.
After the Actions are run from Drafts the notes are archived in Drafts.
I’m toying with the idea of archiving the notes from these meetings into Dropbox, but I’m not sure that it gets me anything ... so I haven’t really looked at it too deeply.
Workflow links
The links for each of the workflows can be found here:
Making Better Meetings ... maybe
To say that I attend a lot of meetings is a bit of an understatement. However, as a manager that is part of my job and I accept that it is something I need to do.
What I have been trying to do at my office is lead more effective meetings, but also to encourage my colleagues to have more effective meetings as well.
It's been challenging as the organization I work for is large and all I can do is lead by example with the meetings that I am in.
Until now ... maybe
I read an article on LinkedIn titled Tired of wasting time in meetings? Try this and there were several suggestions for better meetings some of which I already knew:
- Define the purpose of the meeting
- Define the outcome of the meeting
- Have a timed agenda and someone in charge
And others that I didn't:
- Facts - not opinions!
- Keep people on-point. (Only talk about matters relating to their job)
I think that number 4 is a key idea for any meeting (that isn't a brainstorming meeting) but number 5 is a bit too much. Keeping people on point is an important aspect to any meeeting, but only allowing people to talk about matters related to their job ... what is the dividing line between 'my job' and 'not my job'?
This seems like it wouldn't actually have the intended outcome. I think people who are already quite will be encouraged to stay quite as the topic isn't related to their job (even if it might be) and those that talk too much already will assume that everything is related to their job so they will still contribute inappropriately.
I think that point 5 is much better when restated as:
- Keep people on-point, only talk about the current agenda item
The article did include a nice diagram that you can download (need to provide an email address first).