Meeting Minutes: Adding Zest to a Mundane Task

I have blogged about this once before. Since I am an organized person, I often wind up being the one who records the minutes at our meetings. When I send out meeting minutes, I use a format that includes the following sections.

• Date
• Attendees
• Agreements
• Action Items

I have been doing it this way for years. I tend to document just the agreements and action items rather than record everything that everybody said. Meeting minutes for an hour meeting are no good if they take longer than an hour to read.

Though I am going for brevity, I do add a tiny bit of superfluous information to make the minutes fun to read. Rather than just put the date, I put the date along with a fun fact about something that happened on that day. I also select a quote of the day related to the fun fact.

I use the SiteScope site to get a list of events that happened on a particular day.

• http://www.scopesys.com/today/

  

I get the quotes from a quotations page:

• http://www.quotationspage.com/qotd.html

  

Here are some examples for this week:

• Date

  • November 7 – On this day in 1805, Lewis and Clark first saw the Pacific Ocean.
  • Quote of the day: "It's not foresight or hindsight we need. We need sight, plain and simple. We need to see what is right in front of us." — Gordon Atkinson

• Date

  • November 8 – On this day in 1789, Bourbon Whiskey was first distilled from corn by Elijah Craig in Bourbon, KY.
  • Quote of the day: "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." — P.J. O'Rourke

• Date

  • November 9 – On this day in 1904 was the first time that an airplane flight lasted more than 5 minutes.
  • Quote of the day: "The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night." — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• Date

  • November 10 – On this day in 1989, Germans began punching holes in the Berlin Wall.
  • Quote of the day: "I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy — but that could change." — Dan Quayle

• Date

  • November 11 – On this day in 1647, Massachusetts passed the first US compulsory school attendance law.
  • Quote of the day: "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival." — W. Edwards Deming

My hope is that by spending 2 minutes to add a little interest to my meeting minutes, employees will read them. Come for the tid bits, stay for the action items.

Stenography is once again alive in the lab.