Master your meetings

In this article we’ll show you a workflow around your meetings with other people to get the most out of your conversations and meetings. Let’s dive right in!

Meeting as a new object type

In Capacities, we set up a new object type so every meeting becomes an object in your space, which we can search, open, or reference from everywhere. We call that type “Meeting" and the database "Meetings”.

We’ll just use the “Meeting” template to get started. You can read about it’s properties here. Over time you might realize that you want to create more detailed meeting notes. That’s not a problem, you can add new properties at any point. They will be applied to all people in your database. You can start simple and adapt it to your needs over time.

General techniques

• In your daily note: At the end of the day, reflect on the conversations and encounters you’ve had on that day. Or some interesting discussion you took part in.
• Create a new meeting for any planned meeting or appointment and add the date right away. That will make it show up on your daily note for that day.
• Prepare for the meeting by doing research and writing down your thoughts
• Create an agenda of what you want to cover in the meeting (or your goals, aims, questions)
• Create new objects for items that are relevant in and by themselves. They will be linked to this meeting, but will be a content on their own.
• Link other people if something related to them comes up. If you create inline links, the whole context of the block will show up in the backlink section of that person.
• Use timestamps to add fine-grained time-dimension.

Structure your meeting notes

Here are some ideas on how to best structure you meeting notes:

Preparation

• Research.
• Collect content that you’ve already written down.
• Do a background research on the other person.

Agenda

• This could be open questions for the other attendees, the person who delivers a speech, or questions for yourself
• Items to discuss.
• Decisions to be made.

Meeting notes

• Write down important aspects from the meeting during the meeting…
• …or afterwards

Open tasks

• Write down what actions should come next
• Tag the to-do blocks