Magnus Hedemark<p>I’m figuring out <a href="https://pompat.us/tags/obsidianmd" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ObsidianMD</span></a> more and more but I’m finding there’s enough “extra work” for every meeting that I’m in that I’m not as consistent with taking notes as I was before.</p><p>Old flow:</p><ul><li>open Apple Notes</li><li>new note for every meeting</li><li>no fixed format. Mostly a bunch of bullet points. Usually was good at keeping names and dates.</li><li>discovery of past insights was not good. Capturing of action items and decisions was not effective.</li><li>But I was brain dumping enough into my notes that, given some time, I could eventually find most important things.</li></ul><p>New flow:</p><ul><li>open Obsidian</li><li>navigate to meeting notes folder and start a new note (Templater automatically gives me meeting-specific frontmatter template as well as a meeting notes specific body, which includes some handy <a href="https://pompat.us/tags/dataview" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>dataview</span></a> sections to pull forward context from previous meetings in the same series.</li><li>try to find time during the meeting to fill in the front matter fields. I’m <a href="https://pompat.us/tags/actuallyautistic" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ActuallyAutistic</span></a> & <a href="https://pompat.us/tags/adhd" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ADHD</span></a> and find it really challenging to both engage in the meeting AND fill out my meeting notes frontmatter.</li><li>I try to capture in front matter a lot of the kind of data I want to be able to pull forward in Dataview elsewhere. So I keep things like who attended, who was absent. I try to keep major decisions there, and action items (I’m not yet consistent at this).</li><li>Free form brain dumping still happens in the body of the note.</li><li>If I have time, I’ll pull the whole note (frontmatter + body) into <a href="https://pompat.us/tags/copilot" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Copilot</span></a> / <a href="https://pompat.us/tags/ollama" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Ollama</span></a> (locally hosted <a href="https://pompat.us/tags/ai" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a>) and ask for a two sentence summary, which I then will edit/correct/improve and add back to the note’s front matter in the <code>summary:</code> attribute. This really helps to enrich a Dataview summary of all of my new notes created that day in the day’s Daily Note.</li><li>Any reference to named people gets hard linked like <code>[[Alice Brown]]</code>. I do maintain a person note for each person I work closely with that has some metadata about them like preferred contact methods, location, timezone, supervisor, direct reports, etc. And there are Dataview queries in the <code>person</code> note template to summarize context of recent interactions, decisions made with them, action items associated with them (I’m in a senior supervisory role so there’s a lot of delegation to keep track of).</li></ul><p>I need to keep working at it and figure out how to make lighter work out of keeping good meeting notes while at the same time getting the benefits out of Obsidian that I moved over for in the first place.</p><p>My work hours are very calendar/meeting centric. It’s part of being in a senior leadership role. So most of my work-related notes are currently meeting related notes.</p><p>What I’d like to do more of: I’m holding too much in my head about strategy and inputs to the strategy. This has made me a bottleneck in my own organization, where the managers under me that I’d like to empower with a greater sense of agency feel compelled to consult me for decisions they make because they aren’t holding onto enough of the big picture that I am. I’d really like to do a better job of making what’s in my head accessible, searchable, discoverable.</p><p>I don’t imagine this will mean giving anyone access to my Obsidian notes. Looking through the Tiago Forte lens, thinking of his CODE method, I really need to get more intentional and consistent about Capturing, Organizing, Distilling, and Expressing my thoughts.</p><p>At work, “Expression” would probably look like some combination of Confluence articles, staff meeting updates with memo/presentation artifacts to refer back to, “fireside chat”videos posted to our Slack and saved on our Google Drive with discoverable metadata, etc.</p><p>I’m in the classic bootstrapping paradox where I don’t have the time to do what I need so here because I haven’t done it yet. 😂 Only I can break that cycle, and I will.</p><p><a href="https://pompat.us/tags/pkm" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PKM</span></a> <a href="https://pompat.us/tags/productivity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>productivity</span></a> <a href="https://pompat.us/tags/leadership" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>leadership</span></a></p>