A "Remembrall" for your meetings

Using Roam Research for managing my busy life - How to efficiently plan and record meetings

This post is part of a series of articles explaining how I use Roam Research to manage my work, side projects, and private life. While the basic ideas will be freely available, additional background information and unique customizations will only be available to paying subscribers.

In my last article, I explained how I work with the Daily Notes Page and Tasks. This time, I'll elaborate on how I plan and record meetings.

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A Remembrall as imagined by DALL-E

A “Remembrall" is a magical object from the Harry Potter book series. It is a tiny glass orb filled with smoke that changes color to indicate that the person holding it has forgotten something.

That was why I started using Roam Research - the idea of self-maintaining topic lists that appear precisely when I need a reminder. How often do you have the feeling of being under-prepared for an appointment? How often do you think you want to talk about something but can't remember what? How often do you attend a meeting and lose the action items after that, despite how hard you try to remember them?

Let me show you how I have solved this once and for all. Take your time getting used to the concept I propose here.

Collecting talking points

Whenever something comes into my mind that I want to discuss later, I take these three steps:

• Mark it as a todo to make it actionable

• Link the most relevant topic collector (either in a block in the hierarchy above or in the same block)

• Add the tag #tp (my tag for talking points)

Example of a talking point for the following general project meeting

Meeting preparation

All my meetings will be planned on the corresponding Daily Notes Page with the specific topic collector that best describes the session's subject. One-on-ones with my colleagues will have her or his page as the main topic. A general project meeting will use the project name. If we want to discuss a particular work package or deliverable, I will use a link to these—no fancy titles, no copy-paste from my calendar - just the most relevant subject.

I'll then apply my meeting template, which contains a generic query for talking points.

My template for meetings

All I have to do for meeting preparation is:

1. Link to the topic collector

2. Apply the meeting template

3. Adjust the query to match the topic collector (replacing [[ex-A]])

4. Add additional information like attendees

5. Add extra agenda points if needed

See for yourself how the agenda items magically appear:

Creating a meeting for a topic collector

I use this approach any time I meet with one or more persons. This is how it looks for a 1:1.

Using the same approach for other types of meetings like 1:1s

During meetings

According to my principle of evolutionary continuity, I always make sure that I link relevant items together. This is especially important for notes regarding agenda items. I use block references to tie the notes and the agenda items together. New action items and talking points will go there.

Taking notes during a meeting

So whenever I want to know what already happened regarding an agenda item, I have to click on the small number to the right and find the complete history opened:

Showing the history of an agenda item through different meetings

If we finally discuss an agenda item, I'll note the final result below its reference and tick it done. It now automatically disappears from all queries.

Completing an agenda item - it magically disappears from the queries

After meeting

No further actions have to be taken after a meeting. The agenda for the next conference has already been updated with the latest results of this meeting. All action items are recorded and ready to be addressed.

Conclusion

I've shown a simple process combining different core functions of Roam Research, tags, todos, wiki links, queries, and block references. You can explore this and additional examples in my public graph. I use this concept for all my meetings - no excuses. Once you get used to it, you will love your new magical Remembrall that constantly reminds you of important topics, and (other than in Harry Potter) it also tells you what you were missing.

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I hope you enjoyed the article. Let me know in the comments if you think I missed an important aspect that bothers you when building your own personal knowledge management system.

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