1.1
Principles and practices
Ten beliefs about knowledge work, and twelve habits that follow from them.
Most knowledge work ends in a decision or a recommendation. The thinking behind it stays in your head until someone asks, and by then you’ve forgotten half of it. Keeping that thinking is a skill, and hardly anyone is taught it.
Below are the principles we hold and the practices we follow day to day. They’re opinions. If one of your habits clashes with one of them, it’s worth working out which of the two is wrong.
Principles
- 01
Capture the fleeting
When an idea turns up is the worst time to decide where it goes. Get it out of your head first. Sort it later, once you can see what else you’ve got.
- 02
Maximise ownership
Keep your notes in a format any tool can open, somewhere you control. Apps get bought, changed and shut down. Your notes shouldn’t go with them.
- 03
Minimise transfer
Notes, tasks, meetings and the people in them are one body of work. Spread them over four apps and you spend your day copying between them, and they still drift apart.
- 04
Single source of truth
Paste a fact into three notes and you have three facts, and before long they won’t match. Keep it in one place and link to it.
- 05
Clear vocabulary
A folder is a folder and a task is a task. You shouldn’t have to learn a tool’s private language before you can write something down.
- 06
Relentlessly reduce admin
Saving, renaming, retyping and reformatting isn’t thinking. Let the tools do it and save your attention for the decisions.
- 07
Private by default
Your notes are where you’re honest about clients, plans and colleagues. They should work fine without anyone else ever reading them.
- 08
Performance isn’t optional
If a tool makes you wait, you’ll stop using it. Opening, searching and switching should be instant, whether you have ten notes or ten thousand.
- 09
Decisions should be traceable
You should be able to trace any decision back to where it was made, who made it and why. The same goes for a tool that edits your notes, which should show what it changed and let you undo it.
- 10
Write like you are teaching
Write each note for someone who wasn’t in the meeting. In six months, that someone will be you.
Practices
- 01
Keep one inbox
Anything without an obvious home goes to the same place, whether it’s a voice memo or a photo of the whiteboard. One inbox means one place to check, and nothing gets lost between two.
- 02
Write it up the same day
Meeting notes are most useful in the hour after the meeting. Tidy them that day, while you still know what your shorthand meant. By Friday you won’t.
- 03
Lead with the outcome
Start the note with what was decided, what’s still open and who’s doing what. The detail can go underneath for whoever needs it, which usually isn’t many people.
- 04
Write down why
You’ll find the decision again easily enough. It’s the reason that goes missing, and that’s what you need when someone wants to change it.
- 05
Give every task one owner
Several people might be involved, but one of them gets asked about it. Put their name on it. If you can’t name anyone, it isn’t a task yet.
- 06
Use people’s names
“The client” and “J” make sense today and won’t next year. Write the full name. It’s usually what you remember first when you go looking.
- 07
Quote your sources
When a source says something well, copy the exact line and link back to it. Paraphrases drift, and a few months on you won’t know which words were yours.
- 08
Keep notes small
Give each meeting, idea or decision its own note. Small notes are easier to link and easier to find. If a note starts covering three things, split it.
- 09
Review every week
Set aside time at the end of the week to reread what came in and link it to what you already have. Weekly, it’s quick. Quarterly, it doesn’t happen.
- 10
Archive what’s finished
When a project wraps up, move its notes out of the way. They stop cluttering today’s work and still show up when you search.
- 11
Back up the files
If your notes are files, back them up like files. Keep a copy off the machine you work on, and now and then check that it actually opens.
- 12
Read what a tool wrote
When a tool drafts a summary, files a note or suggests a change, read it before you accept it. A mistake caught now takes seconds to fix. Caught a month later, it can eat an afternoon.