ecent evolution in my job has me attending what I would consider to be too freaking many meetings. And they really aren’t that bad but what has required some workflow adjustment for me is figuring out whether and how to take notes during these meetings and most importantly how to capture the tasks that will fall on me after the meeting.

Before getting into my current solution, though, let’s step back a year or so to my discovery of Doane Paper. Chad Doane is either a clever fellow who’s discovered a paper design that is perfect for a substantial portion of the folks who write/draw, or he’s in my head like some kind of Cusack in Malkovich and our brains just happen to function alike. I suspect it’s the former. Whichever; Doane Paper is ruled paper combined with graph paper and, at least for me, it just works.

So, back to the meetings. I doodle. I think it helps me concentrate. Some might disagree, but I won’t stop. And I have to capture those tasks. Long story short, I started informally dividing my Doane Paper into sections for these functions. It worked pretty well, but I had ideas for customizing it just a bit more. So, I fired up my favorite Mac app, OmniGraffle, and in literally 10 minutes had a Doane Paper Hack (Chad’s description) that I thought would work. It’s completely customized to what I want, I don’t know nor care if it works for anyone else, but if you fancy downloading a .pdf and checking it out, here it is.

Notes from the first of 4 freaking meetings yesterday (taken with my crappy iPhone camera – my apologies) below.

UPDATE: Chad Doane approves, and says he gets about one Doane Paper hack a week and this is the first he’s liked and granted “official” status.