After a year in management consulting, I knew it wasn’t for me. Still, it taught me a few things. I learned how not to be intimidated by brash executives, to do things in Excel that I would never have believed were possible, interpret financial statements and parse a company’s reports, and became adept at making decent dinner conversation during countless client meals.
I also learned about notetaking. During my first client engagement, my manager told me to always take notes in meetings. The ideal format for those notes is a to do list: A list of things that, during the meeting, were decided needed to be done.
He was right. Notetaking is the single best predictor I know of how pleasant someone is to work with long-term. It doesn’t matter if they work for you, you work for them, or you work on the same projects without a formal reporting structure. If they take notes, they’re much more likely to do what was agreed. If they don’t take notes, they probably will do only the things that they chose to remember. What they remember may be different from what was actually decided. During the next meeting, you’ll have the same conversation than during the previous one. Whatever you’re working on with them gets delayed from meeting to meeting.
This type of notetaking is very similar to keeping a to do list. I’m aware that some people don’t have to do lists, and I don’t understand how they get things done.
The beauty of a to do list is that I don’t have to worry about remembering things. I just put them on the list. To do lists, like checklists, take away the mental overhead of trying to remember what needs to be done. I also have a policy of removing things from the list that I haven’t gotten around to doing for a week or more, since I have learned that I’ll probably never do them. Only rarely do I choose to put move those items to a long-term to-do list.
