Get More Done in Meetings

Why not a laptop in a meeting? Here are the reasons I prefer my Tablet PC to a conventional laptop in a meeting: • Keyboard noise can be troubling. I use my Tablet PC pen, which makes writing silent.   • The laptop screen places a barrier between me and my colleagues. I write naturally with my Tablet PC in my lap or flat on the table. The barrier is removed and we can have more open discussions.   • When typing on a laptop I can lose track of the meeting flow. I often lose normal eye contact. With the Tablet PC, it's like I'm writing on a notepad and I can pay better attention.   • I can quickly and easily sketch out any visual concepts discussed, such as an organisation chart or design idea.   • If we're reviewing a PowerPoint presentation, I can quickly mark it up and handwrite notes right on the slides.

Everyone talks of mobility these days—workers are continually looking for ways to stay in touch and access information while they're on the road. But one of the most challenging mobile distances is the distance between your office and your conference room. Depending on your day, you can easily spend more than half your time in meetings.

With my Tablet PC, though, I leave meetings with many of my important tasks already underway. I do not need to wait until I get back to my desk to initiate agreed-to actions. I have no need to try to recall meeting discussions. I get to work right in the meeting.

In this article, I show how I stay productive during meetings using my Tablet PC.

On This Page

	1. Take and Retrieve Meeting Notes
	2. Get Work Done
	3. Create Tasks
	4. Act Immediately on Decisions
	5. Convert Meeting Notes to Text and Distribute Them Right in the Meeting
	In Summary

1. Take and Retrieve Meeting Notes

No doubt about it, taking, and more importantly, quickly retrieving meeting notes, is my number one benefit of using a Tablet PC in meetings. Using Microsoft Office OneNote on my Tablet PC, I take handwritten notes and draw charts and diagrams that help me quickly communicate a concept. I have more flexibility to take notes, and as a result I get more out of them.

Since all my notes are stored on my Tablet PC, it's much easier to retrieve them in meetings—even if I took the notes months ago. How often do you scramble to find information that you know you wrote down weeks earlier? With the notebook-like tabs in OneNote, I can find my notes quickly. I can also do a search of my notes in OneNote—even the ones I have written by hand. I once prevented a loss of tens of thousands of dollars from my departmental budget because I was quickly able to pull up notes from a conversation months earlier.

2. Get Work Done

With a Tablet PC, I've found it much easier to accomplish tasks in meetings without having the distraction of a screen between me and my co-workers. Using Microsoft Office 2003 on my Tablet PC, I work with co-workers to create drafts of work diagrams, project plans, and slide presentations in the meeting as they are being proposed and articulated. With a conventional laptop, there is a barrier between me and my co-workers and I'm less likely to do the work in the meeting. The Tablet PC makes collaboration a much friendlier experience. What better way to create and collect feedback on a draft document than at the time the document is suggested, with all the right people in the room? You can strip hours off your work time, and days off review cycles, all without disturbing the flow of a business meeting.

3. Create Tasks

I create and manage tasks in Microsoft Office Outlook all the time. However, I rarely used my conventional laptop in meetings to manage tasks since it was so distracting to meeting participants. In contrast, the Tablet PC pen and screen allow me to easily and discretely keep Outlook at hand. I can create tasks immediately as I receive them in meetings.

When I identify tasks I use the Tablet PC Input Panel to jot them right in the Outlook TaskPad. It's similar to taking notes on a notepad, but much more effective. I assign due dates, jot notes in the task text field, and even identify who will do tasks. The tasks are now in my formal task system where I can prioritise them, do work on them, and track the status of activities other people are doing. If I record these tasks on paper instead, or worse, try to keep them in my head, it's likely that I will forget to copy those tasks into my system later.

4. Act Immediately on Decisions

There is something that happens to ideas and agreements in the hours or days between when your team creates them, and when your team acts on them. The ideas get stale. They lose their energy. Details can be lost. When you attend back-to-back meetings, it can take a while before you can start on the agreements made in those meetings.

Being able to immediately initiate actions called for in that meeting can make or break the initiative. With Outlook and my Tablet PC and pen I can sketch or outline a proposed solution, and then e-mail it to my team. The result? I get efforts under way much faster and before I return to my office.

5. Convert Meeting Notes to Text and Distribute Them Right in the Meeting

After the end of a meeting, it can take me time to transcribe and send meeting notes to everyone. With my Tablet PC and OneNote and Outlook installed, I can do this immediately as the meeting is wrapping up. While I get more out of my digital notes, other people may have trouble with my handwriting. So first, I convert my digital-ink notes to text. Then, I create an e-mail within OneNote that automatically includes the current page of notes. I send it to people in the meeting and have it done before I leave the room.

In Summary

The Tablet PC has dramatically improved the effectiveness of my meeting time. No longer do I navigate meeting-packed days thinking, "Oh boy, when am I going to get to that stuff." Now, the meeting day is my work day. Meetings are now the place where I initiate much of my work, so I can leave work on time.

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Michael Linenberger Michael Linenberger is the author of Seize the Work Day: Using the Tablet PC to Take Total Control of Your Work and Meeting Day, a book about making practical use of the Tablet PC in a business setting. Michael has been a management and technology professional for more than 20 years, most recently as a program management consultant at a large insurance company in Northern California, and as Vice President of Technology for Connection to eBay, an Accenture Service. As a management and technology consultant with Accenture, he has been advising and managing projects in the San Francisco Bay Area for clients such as: eBay, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Applied Materials, UPS, Adecco, and others. Before Accenture, Michael led the technology department at U.S. Peace Corps.