Taking the cue from @Bmosbacker sat down and went through my routine.
Background: I manage several teams in a company that employs >75000 people worldwide.
I need my routine and support system to be flexible, and ready at a moments notice, because my teams are spread out across 12 countries in different time-zones.
Spending a lot of time in meetings and needing to keep track of actions items across people: to put it simple: a to-do list for others
I have a mixed digital / paper workflow; I take notes in my traveler’s notebook during meetings because I’ve found doing this digitally stops me from focusing on the meeting at hand, and interferes with the human social interaction with others in that meeting. I also really enjoy handwriting notes and sketch-noting meeting topics.
I write all to-do’s on index cards and toss those in my inbox to be processed in OF later. (storage sleeve in my travellers notebook)
Keeping notes of said meetings and interconnecting topics
Once the meeting is done, or at the end of the day shutdown routine, I go over the notes again and filter out any interesting items that I want to follow up on, with a reference to the meeting, again on an index card, and that again goes into my inbox. I then scan the notes with my iPhone, and send it to DevonThink, retrieve the UID and create a short draft with meeting subject - meeting date - attendees - short summary - UID for complete reference (use and iOS Shortcut for that)
I’ll process all index cards during my startup review the next day. I give it that much time on purpose to allow for “digestion” of ideas and give my overall thoughts on the meeting time to mature a bit. This gets rid of the “knee-jerk” reaction I sometimes tend to get This way I have time to reflect and come to other insights.
Leveraging a bird eye view of an organization to see what’s progressing and what’s stuck
I use a Kanban boards for all of my staff, teams and projects / goals. We discuss these in 1:1’s and team meetings, and this gives my a quick bird’s eye view of what’s going on, how much progress is being made, and where my attention is needed most. The team leads and project managers manage the team/project Kanbans and I manage both my own (for my 1:1’s with the board) and my overal stategic plan. (tasks/actions are described a bit forther down)
Building a semi-private internal knowledge base
I use Drafts as my index (notes with unique ideas, reference numbers, links and DT UID’s)
All documents (incl web pages) go to devonthink, Mail also goes there, unless it;s less than a year old then it remains in Apple mail.
Safari webpages: I usually select the summary, or a good extract, and though a shortcut send it to DT as a PDF, the shortcut returns a UID for the PDF, which then get’s stored in Drafts with reference to the source URL, the UID in DT and the short summary/text capture.
Building a private CRM of internal and external stakeholders
Next to references in Drafts all my “CRM” is done in Contacts, with some personal details on each stakeholder if it is useful in the notes field.
Linking notes / documents / tasks to people
Documents / Notes are usually tagged in Drafts with the names of the stakeholders involved. I don’t like to overly tag in DevonThink, since it tends to get cluttered very quickly.
All actions / tasks are tagged with a persons name in OF and before each meeting I process these for the attendees to take actions forward and get status updates during the meeting.
Keeping track of personal and team short / long-term goals and objectives
Each staff member is responsible for their personal board showing personal goals, development, and targets. I find the visual overview, and the “look at the pile of completed actions!” you get from looking at the interface works very well for us. I gives each person a sense of accomplishment, and a visual demonstration of their progress, and accomplishments.
I’ve started adding company purpose statements in these boards for each member of the team to operationalise. You tend to see those a lot these days, the “why are we here” statements of a company. It’s usually very abstract, and by adding them to personal goals, and the Kanban we try to make them operational for everyone.
One example: Climate / sustainability is part of one of the organisational purpose statements, and I’ve asked the team to add them to their boards, and think of a way to operationalise that for them personally, and for the team. It provided a lot of very healthy debate. 1 example of a practical outcome: one team member suggested we reduce printing waste (and cost), and have all meeting documents in PDF form. This has since reduced overall printing cost by 40%, with the ROI for the PDF software being positive in about 3 months. These are small steps, but they all count I think.
Overall in my personal management workflow I need to be able to rely on whatever device is at hand, from iPhone, iMac to iPad Pro. I need to be able to do exactly the same on all of them, and by narrowing the tools I use to the essentials I think I’ve come up with a system that works for me and lets me work from wherever I am in the world. [text/notes/linking: Drafts, tasks: OF, mail: Mail.app, archive: DT, and a little help from LeanKit for the Kanban aspects]