The Half-Life of Meeting Notes

from the Getting Things Done forum at davidco.com:
I like this idea, especially the revelation that a bunch of people have just given a lot of time/money to chiming in on a meeting - the least I can do is not let unprocessed meeting notes fester for too long in my inpile.

What I’m finding is that I need to try to process my notes as soon as possible after I get out of the meeting - ideally immediately. Waiting comes at a high cost. My thinking is that if it is important enough for a bunch of expensive people to spend an hour or so meeting about, it is important enough to give top priority to when processing (have you ever totalled up the hourly rate of the people in the room - yowsa).

I find it takes A LOT of discipline for me to ignore the siren song of non-truly urgent emails, voice mails and people wanting to talk to me that have accumulated while I was in the meeting.

If I’m not able to deal with my meeting notes right after the meeting, I try to do them first when I process my inbox. I’m finding that working my inbox in order from “conversational” material to “printed” keeps me out of trouble. So I’m processing in this order:
1) things that people have said to me in passing or that are in my mind that I haven’t written down - before I completely blank on it
2) meeting notes
3) voice mail
4) email
5) paper mail