- Do you struggle with taking notes in an effective way at work? In this video, I'm going to
share the note taking technique that I developed over
the six years of working at the consulting firm, McKinsey. I do believe that note
taking in an effective way can really make the difference
for you and your career. So please watch until the end for the tips that I have to
share here today with you from all the experiences that I have of really conducting literally
hundreds of interviews with the clients and
internal and external experts over the time of my career. So welcome everyone to
another coffee break here on my channel Firm Learning and as you may be see I got myself some nice consulting merch. So please fix a nice Excel cup. If you are interested to
get this stuff as well check out the merch of Crazy
Management Consultants. Maybe you've seen my
video about two weeks ago on Crazy Management Consultant memes they're so hilarious, so I thought that I'd just
get some merch as well. I will leave a link to their website below in the video description so check it out. But guys, let's now
talk about note taking. And I wanna start by
sharing a little story that really happened to me when I was a young consultant at work, we had a project where we
needed to help a client optimize its working capital. So pretty much optimize its inventory, accounts receivables
and accounts payables. Now we needed to conduct an interview with the head of one of the
business units of the company to sit together with them
and collect some ideas and share some thoughts
on what could be done in that the business unit to really improve the
working capital situation. So I walked into the meeting and probably this was in my
first year of being a consultant and I was accompanied by
a more senior associate with whom we together
conducted the interview. It was a good and long
conversation going on for almost two hours. And I still remember my blog, I had pages over pages of notes that I had written down there just trying to capture everything pretty much of importance
that was being said. So we had this is good conversation. And I remember that we walked
back into the team room and there of course our
project lead was sitting and he was looking at us and asking, so, hey how did it went? What did we learn? So he looked at me and I
tried to give an answer but I was so puzzled, and I tried to look through my notes you know, to really come up
with the most important points of what was discussed, because in my mind there
was just so much being said, so many information that I put down that it was really
difficult for me now to, on the spot really share the top ideas, the top points that we shared. So seeing how much I struggled the senior associate was jumping
in and try to help me out. And he just looked at his notes and said something like, so yes, we had a good conversation. And there were five great ideas that we can now implement really to improve the working capital. One, two, three, four, five, and then to each point
he was briefly describing what the idea was. And after seeing this, how we handled that I was just so astonished how he did this because clearly he did
something completely different in the that he took us notes in the way that he
organized the information while conducting the interview. That now enabled him to communicate in this very effective way. So later I was just sitting with him and we had a good relationship, so I just asked him, hey can you just show
me what you did there? How did you come up with that? How are you taking your notes? So then he showed me his system and this is pretty much now the system that I also took over and
refined a bit over time. And this is the system that I will show you now in this video. But before I talk about
this approach in detail let me give you the top three reasons why taking notes in consulting and probably also many other
professional jobs as well is very important. Let me also share what
is specific about that. So first point is the
special circumstances that you are facing when
you take these notes. So I did some research
before I did this video so I looked how other
how-to-take-notes videos on YouTube look like and many of them are about how you can take these
beautifully looking, super well structured notes, while I trust that this can be great and effective as well as passionately for studying or for taking
notes during university, this just does not work in consulting and indeed probably in most other professional
contexts as way. And the reason is that you are
under a lot of time pressure. So you're sitting in these meetings and often your interview partner the person that you talk
to will talk pretty fast and you cannot just constantly
ask him to slow down because you need to
write it more precisely, you know, you want to call her your notes or anything like that, right? This just will not work. And also after the meeting, you will regularly not have the time to go over all your notes in details and try to rewrite them
or make them look good. Just check out my video on how a typical work week of the day of a consultant looks like. Again I will link it somewhere above, if you see that at first you'll understand why consultants really not have time to now detail rewrite all of them. So bottom line is you need a system where you can take notes efficiently you do not have the time
to make them look great. Second, there's a special
expectation in consulting that especially as a junior you pretty much take notes
all the time, always. Also, if it's about topics that do not directly
relate to your work stream to your specific module,
to your responsibilities. So very often you will be in a situation where maybe a client
walks into the team room and is having a conversation
with the project lead. And then the client talks
about different things and of course the project lead tries to engage with
them as much as possible. And then very often you will
find yourself in a situation where when the client left the project lead will look to you and say, Hey, Heinrich you took notes
of everything he said, right? And then you are like sitting there. Maybe you even feel like that wasn't even about my work stream, why should I have taken notes about that? So for instance, also a team call where a partner talks about
something, doing something maybe you believe that probably
it's not going to be you who will actually implement it. But what if maybe at the end of the call or maybe later in a team meeting, the project lead asks you if you can do that specific piece of work that now the partner talked about earlier and now you will look pretty bad if you pretty much just have to say, okay but I didn't take notes. Can we please go over it again? What exactly I should do? So again, situations like
this come up all the time. So pretty much a good advice for young consultants is whenever information of
significance are being shared by partners, by your
project lead or by clients doesn't matter whether
they're directly related to your work stream or not always take notes. And the third thing that is special about taking notes in consulting is that often, especially
in client meetings you will try to really take
the notes with pen and paper but not just with a laptop. So I know there are these
great note taking programs like OneNote or Evernote, I use them myself or other
applications as well. But especially in consulting, when you sit in front of a client, if you have a laptop in front of you and are typing down
every word that he says often this will create
a big perceived barrier between you and the client. It will also often make
the whole situation much more formal than it is. Maybe the client we closed down, shut down a little bit and will not talk that openly with you because it feels like
every word that he says is now taken down on a protocol. So for these reasons, it is a common point in these coinciding onboarding trainings and also the general way of working that you will try to take
notes, pen and paper. This will often help you to
communicate with your client in a much better way. And for this reason, of course, you need to have a system
that also enables you to take the notes in
a pen and paper format and not only on a computer. And now let's get tangible. How do I do it? What is this note taking system that I really refined and also
implemented in my daily job? And I prepared here a sheet of paper that really shows this. So I hope now that auto focus switches. So you see that there
are different sections on this piece of paper. So I try to, not only just make
a long list of bullet points but really organize the information. Now because I know that's
probably pretty hard to follow just based on this, let me now sketch it for you, how exactly it looks like. I will use my PC for that. So let's now go over our format how exactly this could look like. So this is now a big piece of paper. And as you see now, how you often start by putting the date when
the meeting took place in the top left, then I often also like to put the title, so what was it about? And then I also like to include a list of all the participants. This is also important whenever when you write meeting minutes or any type of protocol after the meeting that it's often good practice
to also write it down who was part of the meeting. So make sure that your
list everybody down. Then a little thing that I
really found useful for myself, it's not necessarily something that I've seen other people do. But what I really found useful is to insert a little drawing of the table and then write the initials
of who was sitting where, and for me, this really helped especially in the beginning of a project where you have lots of different meetings and can easily get to know lots of people in a very short amount of time. For me, it was always difficult after a couple of days
to really remembering. So who was who just based on the names but now with these little sketches, these really helped me to get a bit of a visual
representation of the table then back into my mind, the knowing okay, Mr. So-and-so was the guy who was sitting
at the end of the table in this specific meeting. So this is just a little
mind tag that I use to just help me really
remembering who was who. So then you see the
upper half of the paper, this is now kind of the general area. The general note taking
area where just write kind of general remarks
of what was being said. So this is the part that
now most closely resembles this general old school style of just taking notes, one
point after the other. And of course, if you do run out of space you're gonna, would just
take a second piece of paper at some point is actually
just to continue writing down these bullets as you see here. Now, the more interesting
part is here, the lower part, and on the very bottom quarter of the page I often use two sections. So to-dos for me, to-dos
this for the firm, so for our consulting firm, and then to-dos for the client. So in the conversation, whenever something was coming up where either myself or
later as a project lead, me and or my team needs to do something, I will directly write it down here, not in the upper part but then also whenever there was something where the client confirmed
and committed to do something I would also write it down here. And this was always great
because in the end of the meeting then you can do something
really powerful and say, okay now let me just recap,
what are the next steps, and then you can talk
about what you will do now but then you can also talk about what the client will do now. Because otherwise in a long meeting you often have the situation
that in-between you say, okay this is something that you can do and then maybe the client agrees, but in the very end probably
both of you have forgotten. And if we will have them
pages of notes written out, it can be quite tough to
really find these to-do points. It's really helpful to
have them in one place because then you can recap in the end and you can again ask the client to commit to these to-dos. And then of course also maybe afterwards you wanna write short meeting minutes and then you already
have this list of, to-dos and you do not need to search them among pages of pages of notes. They are just hidden in the
middle of lots of other texts. Now, next here in the
middle part of the page you see an area where you can really take lots of value in the situations that I was describing in the story earlier. And this requires a
little bit of preparation before you walk into the meeting and this preparation is asking yourself what you actually wanna
get out of the interview. And this is indeed also a mistake that some more junior consultants do they just walk into these client meetings, they walk into these interviews. And they're just having
a general discussion about a topic with a client but without a clear goal in mind, what is your objective? What do you wanna take
out of the conversation? Now, coming back to the example of the working capital reduction project. So what do you want to be looking for from these meeting as a
list of tangible ideas that now you hope that the
client will share with you of what could be done to improve the working capital of a company. And so indeed if you know before the meeting that this
is what you're looking out for try to make a section that whenever the client says something that could be used as an idea, that could be used as a
lever in this direction where you directly write it down. Because this now is really powerful whenever afterwards, somebody asks you, well what are you actually
taking out of this conversation? You can list exactly these
reasons, these levers these ideas that you
collected in the meeting. So now that being said, what do you use, the bigger part of front, where here you write on all the things that are neither to do
for you or the client, and are also not directly applicable to this main objective of
the meeting that you have for instance, collecting
optimization ideas. So this could be just other general points of information that you
find worthwhile taking notes that the client shares, pretty much everything else that somehow seems to be relevant but you do not wanna add into one of these other
buckets that we have below. So trust me, if you
employ a system like this for your specific situation as well, it will be far more organized than 99% of most people walking outside and doing these kinds of interviews. I hope this was indeed
helpful and valuable. And as always, if you have
any questions on this topic leave me a comment below
in the comment section because you know that by leaving a comment not only will I try to
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might also interest you. Now, let me add by
saying thank you so much for everybody who watched until the end. I very much appreciate that. As you know, I release a video on this channel every single Saturday. So looking forward to next
week, to next Saturday to talk about the next topic. So until then, bye-bye and good weekend to all of you.
