How to Take Notes for Work | Note-taking Tutorial for Professionals

🧑🏻‍💼 Let's get one thing clear: taking notes for work is not - and should not be - the same as taking notes for personal or academic use. In this note-taking tutorial for professionals, I draw from my experiences as Product Marketer and as a former Management Consultant and share exactly how to take notes for work.

Not only do I share the note-taking technique I developed specifically for work over the past 7 years, I also provide you with templates so you can implement these professional note-taking concepts immediately. Whether you manage projects as a product marketer or management consultant, you are under a lot of time pressure to take accurate notes.

You will still benefit from this video even if you are a student looking for note-taking techniques on how to study in college because while other YouTube videos teach you how to take pretty notes, the note-taking method in this video is action-oriented, it pushes you to get work done.

Let's dive in ✍️

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
00:09 Why work notes are different
01:08 Guiding principles
02:25 Meeting notes for myself
05:03 Meeting notes for 1 team
07:52 Meeting notes for multiple teams
09:15 Download templates

RESOURCES I MENTION IN THE VIDEO

MY FAVORITE GEAR

*MY TOP 3 FAVORITE SOFTWARE*

BE MY FRIEND:

👨🏻‍💻 WHO AM I:
I'm Jeff, a full time Product Marketer. In my spare time I like to tinker with tools and create systems that help me get things done faster - or as one of my friends puts it: "Get better at being lazy" 😏

PS: Some of the links in this description are affiliate links I get a kickback from 😇

Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and may not reflect that of my employer

#takeNotesForWork #notetaking #productivity

[JeffSu]

How do you currently take notes at work? 🗒

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro
00:09 Why work notes are different
01:08 Guiding principles
02:25 Meeting notes for myself
05:03 Meeting notes for 1 team
07:52 Meeting notes for multiple teams
09:15 Download templates

[VeronicaSteele]

I love these templates. My trick to meeting note success is email! Every meeting has a calendar invite, I forward the invite to myself, update the email body with my meeting note template that I saved as a signature (Outlook trick), and then store my notes in my email until I can process them into my other systems (to do list, documentation, etc). By forwarding the calendar invite, I have a list of all the attendees and meeting details (date, time, agenda) without needing to retype the information.

[clarissadesimoni]

Kudos for the originality! I feel like a lot of YouTubers are repeating the same tips over and over, but you’ve given us actually useful and original tips! Thank you!

[charlenefu]

Hi Jeff! I am currently a college student who will become an intern as a management consultant intern at Accenture in less than 10 days and I just want to say how amazing your videos are. I was literally panicking about my upcoming internship for not being able to handle it well and your tips truly helped my anxiety. Do you mind also posting more videos on how to network or build a better relationship as an intern/ entry level analyst inside of the company? In addition, I follow you both on YouTube and 小红书，and as a native Chinese speaker, your Chinese is so fluent!! I’d love to connect with you and chat more since I am currently diving into the management consulting industry and I’d love to hear any experiences and suggestions you have. Thank you!

[LilMonty]

I saved this video two years ago because I thought it was interesting. I can’t thank you enough for this! Game changer for my work today

[thesb]

This is one of the best channels on YouTube. Give him his flowers!

[mrk]

We do something similars. Tip from my side: Always assign people to action items (called „deliverables“ in our documents), that‘s necessary for people to feel responsible. I think I like the idea of having multiple meetings in one document and will try implementing it.

[Challenze]

I am pleased to see that Excel is used to capture notes. In fact, I started doing so many years ago. But, back then people think I am crazy for not using Word. Lol

[biscuitthecat]

Changing industries and your videos have been extremely helpful. Appreciate that you're not charging for the docs/sheets.

[kuanhuachen]

Love that you mention about the google sheet shortcuts and also the shortcut symbols!

[huckster]

When taking notes in Excel, you could keep the template in a separate tab at the bottom (named "template") and just copy that over for the new week. Saves you from having to delete the content from the previous copied week.

Also, I just stumbled across your channel and have now insta-subscribed.

[bojidarkamenski]

Am i the first one
After watching the video - he helped me so much, I found this channel recently, but I've watched all the videos 🤣🤣. Thanks dude

[savannahnalls]

This has to be the most informative channel on youtube for professional development/productivity. Thank you!

[casdemorree]

I use onenote for note taking.
I love the meeting details function it has.
When you press that and select the right meeting, everything is imported from Outlook. Such as attendees, topic, notes sent with the invitation. Makes it all so much easier.
And no need for followup emails with takeaways because a chat is automatically created in Teams where you can put those takeaways in a Loop component.

But besides the technological solutions, loving your tips on how to increase the quality of note taking. I was (and still am) really struggling with this.
I'll be using your tips for sure.

[rossmarley]

The information shared for note taking was done very well. For action items I like to put action-open (name) - (then action). When the action is complete I update that line to action-done. This lets me do a key word search for "action-open". I can then see complete list of open action items, who is assigned and on what meeting date was the action item opened.

[cindyhoffman]

Thank you for this. I just sent this to my daughter who got her first job out of college. Great content!

[rusty]

With this pandemic situation and how we jumps from one meeting to another, note taking really helps.. and note taking with a good technique will definitely helps..
I'll be sharing this with my team..
Thanks Jeff!!

[johndoe]

Those template are brilliant! I've recently been thrown in the deep end of having to interface and keep track of multiple teams. That last template and approach is gold!

[biknjable]

So grateful to run into your channel and learn your pro tips for PM, for FREE. Truly appreciate you for sharing this content as I was specifically looking for help with meeting note-taking, this is incredible.

[raposobernardo]

I started watching your channel last week and I think your content is AWESOME!
My work is so much easier now!
Thanks Jeff!