Too many minutes

By minutes, I do not mean those on the clock, but those of meetings. I'm the fella who writes the meeting minutes around here. I don't mind it, but when the meetings all come at the same time, it can really irk me.

Ask around most people who do take minutes regularly and they'll say they do not like to record the whole meeting. I don't either, so everything that is said in the meeting room has to be recorded on paper and memory lane. Wanting us to re-listen to the entire meeting again is a bloody waste of time and honestly we've got better things to listen to than the monotonous ramblings of people like Directors.

I don't know shorthand, and even if I did, I don't know if it'd be useful anyway. What's important about taking notes during the meeting is being able to capture the important points that need to be noted down, summarising them objectively and after the meeting, being able to write them out coherently.

Most meetings encompass some disagreements, deliberations, jokes, out-of-point topics, etc. This is where the minute-taker can take a time-out. Woohoo!

Also, some meetings don't keep to the agenda and keep jumping from one topic to another and back again. Here, the minute-taker needs to be able to draw the links and present them in the minutes as one.

My experience doing the journalism module in Poly was quite useful in this sense. Very similar skills required, I feel, only that journalists need to be much more inquisitive and minute-takers must must must stay quiet and just listen. Best part about both is how important it is to use simple understandable English because the aim is the same - we write for others to read.

I finished both the Safety and Operations minutes. Now I'm left with the 2 more heavy-weight ones: Management and Board of Directors. Argh.

Minutes shouldn't take too long to be written. One's memory can only be so good. I'm giving myself up to tomorrow to get the remaining minutes written.

If I'm in the mood, my minutes get done up really quickly. Lately the meetings have dragged really long so they've been taking more effort to churn out - plus, I'm just not that in the mood. Haha!

At least I do take the job seriously right? You have no idea how many times I've seen bad English in minutes/reports. I can only cringe. I'll make sure that whoever has to go through minutes I write won't have the same problem. Plus, I always try to make it a little more interesting to read by changing the sentence structures such that it doesn't become too boring. (There's only that much space to be creative.) Then again, all meetings without the off-topics ARE boring. I only create an illusion that reading the minutes beats listening to the actual thing.

It's back to minute writing and I'm behind time. My own timetable at least.