To succeed at work, stop relying on your memory

Documents are at the core of our daily work. We send and receive a ton of e-mail. We also develop proposals, write memos, take or receive meeting notes, arrange receipts and perhaps generate Excel spreadsheets. Those need to be organized. But we often fail on that score, oblivious to that necessity, resisting the clerical task of filing or not understanding how to file things effectively if we are so inclined.

Calgary consultant Adrienne Bellehumeur believes documentation – she prefers to call it “dynamic documentation” – can make you more effective. At the core of her thinking is that within 24 hours of receiving information, you must file or organize it. “You need to get things out of your head and onto paper (or your digital notes) to drive momentum and capture intellectual capital before – poof! – your short-term memory lets it go,” she writes in The 24-Hour Rule and Other Secrets for Smarter Organizations.

She stresses that documentation is not a passive activity, a burden tangential to the other more important stuff on our to-do list. We should be documenting to drive action. We should be taking control of information, rather than hoping for the best.

She asks you to imagine a late Friday afternoon meeting with your boss, at which some great ideas were discussed, plans for immediate actions confirmed and points for further action emerged. It’s the start of a long weekend and you leave excited only to return Tuesday and, not having taken or organized notes, are at a loss to remember most of the specifics, let alone context and nuance. Or you attend a conference, listen to a seminar or exhibit at a trade show and you or your team fail to record a brilliant idea that could be helpful for your business.

Documenting has three building blocks:

• Capturing: You need the information in front of you in some form to act upon it.
• Structuring: You need to create a document, a set of documents, or a system to shape the information you have.
• Storing and leveraging: You need to store the information in the right place – usually a system or folder structure – and then use it over time when helpful.

It begins with capturing all the ideas and action items that occur throughout your day. Create a daily list of action items as well as a running list of items you want to attack over time. Keep project lists, bringing the connected activities together in one place and offering a spot to record the thought you had earlier today to send a report to a colleague on that team.

She also recommends regular brain downloads. She doesn’t like furiously scribbling all the time, as if the act of taking copious notes is preferable to thinking. When she attends a conference, for example, she is looking for a few crucial tidbits of information that matter for her. So she advises taking 15 minutes at the end to capture key themes, ideas, thoughts and feelings that they inspire. She keeps a conference and course folder, but stresses if she doesn’t move the information to action – something she is working on, writing about or getting feedback on – in a short period, the information does not hold its value for long.

Acting on information within 24 hours remains critical. Take time every day to reflect on the last 24 hours – the meeting, conversations and reading – and rethink its value and how to use it. Then move the information to the right place for the system you develop. Also, process it, putting it into your own voice and the lenses through which you view ideas.

Give documentation some thought. Develop a system that works for you.

Quick hits

• Quit working until you’re miserable, advises consultant Joel Garfinkle: “Continuously pushing yourself to exhaustion, resulting in frayed temperaments, is detrimental to your well-being and has repercussions for those around you, both at work and home.” Set some healthy boundaries to strike a balance.
• If you have anxiety when making presentations, communications coach John Millen recommends concentrating on how you can serve your audience; shifting the focus from yourself and your nervousness to others can do wonders.
• To protect your reputation, consultant Randall Craig suggests going through all your social media posts and deleting them if embarrassing, don’t reflect your current views or could be taken out of context. Pay attention as well to items in which you are tagged.
• “Competence is often less of a problem than confidence,” observes Ottawa thought leader Shane Parrish.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.