On the Importance of Making Notes

This week I missed to make a phone call I agreed last week. I was supposed to call a prospective client on Tuesday afternoon. In my table calendar I had three items written down for Tuesday. The first two were reminders to send preparation emails to clients whose trainings take place next week. This I did. The third item just said "ip()", that's all. I wondered about it, but couldn't figure out what the scribble meant. So I ignored it.

This morning, two days later, I woke up to the nagging feeling that I had forgotten something. And suddenly it hit me; I was supposed to call client T. and talk about the training offer. I felt bad, how could anyone trust me if I can't keep a simple phone call appointment? Then I realised that everybody makes mistakes and the more appointments you make the more secure it becomes that at some point you'll make a mistake. This was an opportunity for me to learn. I took a look into my better notes, which are a mind map on the hard disk of QualiBook and I found the details of the appointment. The problem was that I didn't check the mind map every day.

When I saw the details, I understood what the mysterious scribble in my table calendar was. "ip" stands for afternoon ("iltapäivä") and it makes absolutely no sense to write that into a calendar. I had doodled it while I was on the phone with the prospective client. When I'm on the phone I concentrate fully on the person on the other end and I find it very hard to make notes when I'm talking. Maybe I had been interrupted right after the phone call and couldn't fill in the details in the table calendar leaving just a riddle in it. I knew that I had agreed to call on Tuesday in the afternoon. The name of the client would have been much more useful to write down.

To avoid this kind of embarrassment in the future, I decided to check the mind map every week, on Sunday, and fill my table calendar with appointments from it. This way I won't miss a thing.