Bear, Diah and Pasha

Taking Notes 101

Posted on the March 14th, 2011 under Papa Bear,Work by Papa Bear

Taking good notes during a meeting can be a crucial time saver. Headaches can be avoided with good taking notes skill and this skill is generally greatly appreciated by your superiors, colleagues as well as subordinates. Your notes allow you record important takeaways from the meeting. A point to remember when taking notes is to keep them well organized so that you can easily and quickly reference to the important information later.

So, if you attend a meeting, make sure you take down notes. It doesn’t matter what you use to take notes since each note can be a personal record of discussions, decision or actions that you or someone needs to take. The notes would be important references long after the meeting has ended. Every person in a meeting should be taking his or her own notes. Unless the meeting minutes are very comprehensive, meeting notes might save the day!

Here are the basic steps in taking notes:

Record first, sort later – Put date and meeting title at the top. Record everything that we feel important. Pay attention to the discussion at the same time. Sort the notes after the meeting.
Record only what you need – Actions or decisions affecting you, key reasons for the actions, statements that you made and any other key points that would be important later on. Do not try to take down everything. You will miss the meeting.
Record by hand – It is faster and you will not be distracted by something else, such as when you are taking notes on your laptop.
Summarize and Sort - Categorize them by items to be actioned by you, main decisions and other references. Use highlighters, color pens as well as boxes, underlines or asterisks. There is no need to rewrite your notes.

Below is a good example of an excellent note taking during a meeting. I took this during my department meeting last week. Let me know if you have any trouble reading or understanding it.

Hope that now you have learned some basics in taking notes in a meeting. Thank you for reading Taking Notes 101 and have a great meeting!

Angry Birds: Release your Stress

Posted on the March 13th, 2011 under Games by Papa Bear

It was during one of the most critical moments of a project that I had to manage where things were hot and spicy. Stress levels were high among the project team members. One day, a friend, who worked in the same project, came with a brighter than usual smiling face, showed me something on her iPhone. Miss M, please have a good smile when you read this and thank you for the birds..

On her iPhone, I was introduced to the Angry Birds for the first time. She showed me how to play and imagine that the green pigs are the people that brought troubles to the project. We had a good laugh and stress levels effectively went down.. So, when I got my HTC Wildfire, the first app that was downloaded into it was the Angry Birds.

Shortly after that, both Pasha and Mama Pasha got hooked on it as well. Pasha can play it until the battery goes flat.. It takes strategies and lots of trial and errors to complete a mission.

Recently, when HTC upgraded Wildfire, from Android 2.1 Eclair to 2.1 Froyo, Angry Birds Seasons made their way to my phone and now I have a collection of seasons for more hours of interesting and challenging game play. All thanks to Froyo, which allows apps to be installed into the SD card thus giving me the much needed space for the Angry Birds..

If you have an Android phone, iPhone or iPad, go and get the Angry Birds. Even if you are not stressed to begin with.. And if you have those gadgets mentioned and do not have Angry Birds installed, you might need to check your ~~bird~~ err.. ~~brain~~ head.. Peace!

Caution! Playing higher levels may introduce stress!