Real world tip of the day: take notes on meeting agendas

Hey law school students!

Here at Meme, we're committed to preparing you for work in the real world. To this end, look for more posts in the coming weeks with tips for how to deal with office life. Everything from "how often should I go to the bathroom?" (quite frequently when you first start, less and less as time goes on) to "what should I order for lunch?" (Low fat tuna salad on toasted rye, honey mustard, and optionally cheddar cheese).

Today's tip is: In meetings, print out the meeting agenda and take notes on it. Don't bring a spiral notebook, and definitely don't bring a lappy:

1. If your notes are on a meeting's agenda, it's easy to associate them with the meeting / topic at a glance. On the other hand, all slices of notebook paper look alike.
2. You'll often want to refer to agenda items in your notes, and this is easier when they're on the same physical piece of paper (e.g., you can draw arrows and shit).
3. Relative to a spiral notebook, it's harder to file annotated meeting agendae. This is good. If you can easily file your notes, you'll be tempted to file them away and not do anything with them. Instead, you should place your annotated meeting agendas right on the surface your desk.
   
   Having a mess of scattered papers on your desk will make you uncomfortable and therefore motivate you to copy your meeting notes to a more useful (and computerized) location so you can throw the papers away. (Another strategy that helps in this respect is to make your notes embarrassing for passersby to see by filling their margins with practice signatures, small colored in circles, and Greek letters (particularly lower-case alpha and capital delta (also called triangle!))).