Help to manage an Actions List

[JJM417 0]

I've read through a lot of the posts in the Productivity category, so the first thing I want to say is that I'm a relative EN newbie and by no means a 'power user'.

 

So with that out of the way let me explain what I'm trying to do and ask for some guidance from this forum on how to do it in EN.

 

I work on projects and take notes of weekly project meetings in EN and I've been doing that on one note per meeting/project combination.

As well as making notes on progress we (by we I mean I)  also assign actions to people; you know the kind of thing - description of what's to be done, name of person to do it, and the due date.

At the next meeting we review the actions that have been completed and those that are still outstanding and we add new Actions.

 

The thing is that all the Actions, outstanding or otherwise, are in the EN note from the last meeting so I've been looking for a way of linking back to last week's actions from this week's EN note.

 

I've tried embedding a link to another document (spreadsheet) of Actions, but that link is still in last week's note and as far as I can tell can be linked only to that note.

 

It occurred to me that I might be going about this the wrong way, so how do you solve this problem?

[CalS 5,280]

If you put the spreadsheet in its own note in EN you can access all actions independent of the meeting notes.  You don't need to link anything since you just go to the spreadsheet.  You can even create a shortcut to that note and get to it quickly.  If you tag or keyword all of your meeting notes with something like Project.Name and Meeting you can quickly find the notes.  If you import the actions into the spreadsheet using the same verbiage as the note, you can quickly find the meeting note.

 

It gets a bit gnarly if you want to track actions by individual across projects across meetings.  If you put all the followups from a given meeting in that meeting's note you have to access all meeting notes for a project to determine what the open tasks are.  Not friendly as you have determined.  There are ways to do this in EN, but IMO not as friendly as your spreadsheet or using specific team task management software.  You could do this in EN through the use of individual notes for action items or grouping action items into their own note, and then applying tags and keywords for access.  But these methods could prove more work than the spreadsheet solution.