Meeting Preparation During Startup Routine

I find it helpful during my startup routine to prepare for each of the meetings I have on a given day. After I preview my schedule for the day, I prepare for each meeting in order.

If a meeting is related to an ongoing project, I open the project folder in DEVONthink. To make this quick and easy, I keep a link to each project’s folder in the notes section of Things for that project. I then activate a Keyboard Maestro script that does the following steps, which you can complete manually if you do not use Keyboard Maestro:

1. Prompt me to provide the title of the notes. I use the naming format “notes – yyyy-mm-dd – title of notes” so that when I sort my files in alphabetical order in DEVONthink, I can see the notes for each project by date, separated from other files for that project. Take a look at the screenshot below to see a folder for an esports tournament I was recently planning. You can see that the notes end up organized together, with other documents related to the project in the same folder.
2. Activate DEVONthink 3.
3. Create a new markdown text document.
4. Name the file with the title of my notes, based on the prompt in #1.
5. Add the following to the body of my notes: table of contents (using the TOC markdown symbol, which automatically creates a table of contents based on the headings within a note), the title of the notes, and headings for attendees, agenda items, resources, and notes (see example below).
6. Flag the note in DEVONthink. This helps me quickly find the notes during the day, and I do not remove the flag until I have processed any tasks the meeting generates.

For each meeting, I typically define the agenda items during my morning startup routine to ensure that I use the meeting time as productively as possible. I will share how I take notes in a future article.

Preparing for my meetings during my startup routine ensures that I am ready when a meeting begins, especially on those days when I have a lot of meetings, or when I am interrupted just before a meeting time. In addition, this helps ensure that I use the meeting time as effectively as possible.