The Life Admin pack has made managing my personal everyday stuff easier, but I’m struggling to expand/ develop a space for my work stuff. Has anybody got some inspiration to get the ball rolling? Aiming for simplistic like Life Admin, but somewhere to store meeting notes, request details, misc info etc.
For context, I’m a data analyst in a state government organisation, so I get requests for analysis on certain topics, alomst daily meetings across various departments etc. I’m obviously happy to cater to my specific needs, my brain is just struggling to start.
Faced with similar issues, I spent a lot of time thinking about categorization. How can you group the meetings (by department, by topic, by annual budget…)? How can you categorize the analyses?
I can’t give more specific guidance because our general circumstances are quite difference - I’m in a 10-person business.
Meetings are an interesting one. I’ve made a note on the whiteboard to specifically review the ‘small business’ system with this in mind.
I think there are a couple of ways you could look at ‘meetings’ as a thing. Which you prefer is situational and maybe just a matter of taste.
They are subordinate to some other item
In this situation the meeting isn’t the thing you’d track. The thing it’s about is the item in your system – it’s the thing that has an ID.
Then meetings are just one of the things you store in relation to this item. You might like to tag them in your notes so you can bring them all together, but this pattern looks like this.
Area 10-19
├── Category 11
│ ├── ID 11.11
│ │ ├── Artefact A
│ │ ├── Meeting minutes <<<
│ │ └── Artefact Z
│ └── ID 11.12
│ ├── Artefact A
│ ├── Meeting minutes <<<
│ └── Artefact Z
└── Category 12
└── ID 12.11
├── Artefact A
├── Meeting minutes <<<
└── Artefact Z
Area 20-29
└── Category 21
└── ID 21.11
├── Artefact A
├── Meeting minutes <<<
└── Artefact Z
They are their own thing
I’ve done this in the past – I even remember the category, it was:
10-19 Administration
└── 12 Meetings
└── ...
I feel this works better for the sort of high-level review meeting that might not be about one specific thing. The weekly project review, say. In this case, that gets an ID, 12.11 …, and you sort by date within there.
Though, I’d have an ID for that in the PMP system and my feeling sitting here today is that the weekly project review meeting should follow the first pattern and just be a child of an ID in that structure.
Some other pattern?
There’s probably a third way.
I’ve pinged @Alex by text, he might have a view on this.
A separate reply as re-reading this I realise we’ve hyper-focused on the ‘meetings’ aspect of your question, @Rossage.
For the other stuff, I don’t think the small business pack is going to help. We’re designing it for small business: not for employees in state government.
In which case we’re back to the basics as per the workbook/workshop: start by throwing a bunch of stuff in a mind map or on to sticky notes. Hopefully the Aussie lull between now and the end of January gives you a bit of breathing room to do that.
Also check out the specific lessons in the workshop where ‘Johnny-in-a-suit’ gives tips for those of you at work.
I think the general rule for any small business is that you follow your “subordinate to something else” approach - the meeting is not what the business is there for, it’s there to sell the products or services and make a profit.
So if you’re in a meeting discussing graphic design with your designer for the new posters that are going up at the trade show next month, you’ll already have an ID for that, either subordinate to the trade show ID and category or subordinate to the marketing and graphic design ID and category. So the details about the meeting go there.
The massive exception to this is if you are running a project as a project manager inside someone else’s business, in which case the meeting minutes are part of the “control plane”, or monitoring and controlling the work of the project. In this case they definitely go into the PMP structure under 16 Communications in the 16.31 Meeting Minutes ID. This way you keep the control plane completely separate from the “data plane”, or project outputs, which all go in 20-29 and 30-39.
I think the subordinate approach would work best, I may taken a “standard zeros” approach where them meetings ID/ reference is common across categories.
I’ll try set aside time on the weekend to review the workbook as suggested, I agree that Small Business isn’t quite appropriate