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I attended an event today on minute taking.  Our organization set it up for Admin Professionals' Week.  Unfortunately, my first impression of the speaker was not very good because she was dressed down and looked rather frumpy.  I don't believe in judging a book by its cover, but I was amazed at how easily my mind went there and how I equated how she looked to what she had to say.  I was happy that my first impression had been wrong.  The presentation had all the key aspects of basic minute taking, and because that was her audience, it was helpful and informative to the group.  I appreciated the work the speaker had put into the presentation and the fact she made herself available to our group.  She was however a paid speaker so I would have expected more.  This incident today just reinforced to me again that whether we like it or not, how we present ourselves really does make a difference in how we...

It is important to read other people's minutes.  Especially from meetings that your boss may have something to do with.  It can be beneficial for a number of reasons: It will give you a broader idea of what your boss is involved in and will help you assist him or her better; It will help you understand the business better, which will help you in taking your own minutes; It can give you pointers on how to minute better by looking at how they worded a sentence or handled a discussion.  You can use some of the words they used.  Whenever I learn a new word or phrase, I add it to my list and if I'm ever stuck, I go back to the list and choose something appropriate; It will also give you good tips on what not to do.  Many times I have read minutes and there was a lot of he said/she said in it, or it was so point form it didn't make a lot of sense.  Looking at it as an outsider helped me to see how that was not the best way to record ...

It is very useful to prepare an annotated agenda when going into a meeting.  For those who have never used one (or heard of it), it is simply an agenda with notes on it.   For the agenda that I send to the meeting participants, I annotate it to let them know why an item is on the agenda or if there are any attachments.  In my example below you will see that I put brackets around the notes and italicize them.   Call to Order: 1.  Adoption of Agenda (Motion Required) 2.  Approval of Previous Minutes of December 25, 2016 (Attached) (Motion Required) 3.  ABC Matter (Deferred from November meeting) (For Discussion) 4.  Staff Communications (15 minutes to discuss any concerns from staff) For the agenda for the Chair and myself, I prepare it as above, but with cheat notes so he will not forget some points he wants to make or that I want to remind him to bring up.  My new boss had never used an annotated agenda befo...

It's been a while! I took a couple of years off blogging because I felt I didn't have much left in the way of interesting things to say.  So I've been just been programming, and studying, and learning this and that.  I've been doing a bit of Cloud development, and I taught myself iOS development, and after years in the Google cocoon I poked my head out and learned how people do things in the real world with open source technologies. And lo at long last, after some five years of tinkering, I finally have something kind of interesting to share.  I wrote a game!  Well, to be more precise, I took an old game that I wrote, which I've perhaps mentioned once or twice before, and I turned it into a mobile game, with a Cloud backend. It has been waaaay more work than I expected. Starting with a more-or-less working game, and tweaking it to work on Cloud and mobile -- I mean, come on, how hard can it be, really?  Turns out, yeah, yep, very hard. Stupidly hard. Especially ...

I have always had trouble knowing when to use the words 'then' or 'than'.  Sometimes it is easy to figure out, but other times I struggle.  Well, today I came across a sentence where the person used 'then' and I was pretty sure it should have been 'than', but wasn't positive.  Rhymes like the following have always helped me like: - 30 days have September, April June and November, all the rest have 31 excepting February, which has 28 days clear, 29 days each leap year   - 'i' before 'e'  except after 'c' (but there are exceptions) - or what a school teacher I worked with taught me about when to use 'I' or 'me' in a sentence.  If you can change the sentence around and use 'we' then you would use 'I' in the sentence, if you can change the sentence around and use 'us' then you would use 'me' in the sentence.  For example: "We went to the store."  Because you used 'we...

Do you want to get better at what you do?  Share it!!  You wouldn't believe how much I learn each time I give a minute-taking or travel webinar.  Because I am giving the webinar I have to review the material and make sure I know my stuff.  The audience will certainly know if I don't.  The same can apply in your workplace.  If there is sharing of information among the admins, then we can learn from each other and we all grow.  You can do it formally in a teaching setting or informally talking to each other at a team meeting.  Some things that the more experienced admins could teach would be minute-taking, travel arrangements, meeting scheduling, event planning and organizing your boss.  Some of the younger workers could teach us new tricks with technology to do all of the above.  The next time you figure out how to do something, send an email to your team and share it.  They might already know, but then again it m...

Being an Executive Assistant is more than just a title.  When you get to this level it is expected you will take on leadership responsibilities.  I am in an Administrative Assistant role again and am really enjoying it, but having just finished my career as an Executive Assistant, I am appreciating the work that they do. Now that I am looking at it from an Administrative Assistant's perspective, I see the EA role as being someone to look up to and seek guidance from.  It should be someone who has experience and knows their way around an office.  The person should also have initiative and be an ideas person.  When I was an EA I loved coming up with new ideas, but I also had to listen to what others on the team thought because together we came up with the best ideas. Some things that an EA can do to show leadership: chairing (or starting) an admin team planning for and organizing a schedule for replacements when other administrative s...