The Problem

John Doe is a young devoted, hardworking, and enthusiastic entrepreneur who deals with multiple clients daily. In his company, he is the Technical Lead Salesman who gathers the software requirements from the customer, interprets them into meaningful user stories, and forwards it to the development team.

After long meeting sessions with the client, John would type down the Minutes of the Meeting (MoMs) in separate MS Word files. Unfortunately, he never backed up his work and always used to save his progress on his local HP Pavilion Aero laptop. One fine day, all his hard work got ruined due to uncertain reasons:

His machine got hacked!
A Blue Screen of Death¹ crashed the laptop.
He used an infected USB that wiped all his precious data.
A hot coffee cup spilled out on the laptop.

Illustration of Data Lost Factors

I guess we don’t want to know what happened next, right?

The Solution

Like John Doe, we often make the same mistakes that lead to uncertain circumstances. To overcome such horrible experiences, we’ll see better approaches to keeping our MoMs much safer and more organized.

💡Switch From Notepad To Google Keep

The Windows Notepad is indeed a handy tool that helps to note down crucial points during a meeting, but there are some drawbacks that we mostly ignore.

We can only type text or emojis.
We cannot save images in Notepad.
We cannot export our content as a PDF or Word file.
We cannot copy/paste the content in rich text format.

On the other hand, using Google Keep is a much better option for keeping our precious data safe. We need a Google account, and voila, we’re in.

Navigation To Google Keep From The App Bar

To visit the Google Keep app, we can also type keep.google.com in the URL of the browser.

Below are some benefits of Google Keep:

Our data is now available on the cloud, which means no more hustle and bustle for data backup.
We can format our content by inserting text, emojis, code fragments, images, drawings, and checkboxes.
We can categorize multiple notes by adding labels.
We can export our notes to Google Docs format.
We can prioritize our notes by setting reminders.
We can share our notes with the client during the meeting.
We can access our data from multiple devices like smartphones², iPhones, iPad, and Apple Watch³.

📃Organize Your MoMs Using Google Docs

Rather than maintaining individual Notepad or MS Word files, we can use a single Google Doc template to track down the progress of our projects with these below steps.

Visit meet.google.com and create a Google Calendar event.
Hit the Google Meet Video Conferencing button (optional).
Once you’re done, click on the Save button.
Open the Minutes of the Meeting Google Doc Template⁴ file.
From the File menu, select Make a copy to copy it on your Google Drive.
Finally, replace the placeholder text with your content.

Conclusion

Thanks a lot! I hope you have enjoyed reading this far. Using the above two approaches, we not only get synchronized data for the created Minutes of Meeting but also our team collaboration becomes more effective and robust.