Rapid Documentation for Workshops


This is the first of the Tech Sherpa series of guides, which is about helping you use cloud-based productivity tools more effectively. Like the friendly sherpas of the Himalayas, I intend to help you attain new heights, working comfortable among the clouds.

My first note was a bunch of posts-its with things to do stuck to my laptop. It evidently was taken December 30, 2008 (7am?) at IDEO’s San Francisco office on the Embarcadero.

One of my favorite cloud services is Evernote. I have over 14,000 notes saved in it: random ideas, web clippings, PDFs, and photos of post-its… lots of photos of post-its.

I’m going to walk you through a relatively new workflow I have discovered which relies on Evernote’s mobile app — Android or iOS doesn’t matter — and has made a quantum leap in time saved spent documenting.

The typical flow for documenting a workshop is: You take a bunch of photos and videos throughout the workshop, snapping photos of all the presentations, any boards, post-its, worksheets, or prototypes. You then transfer the photos and videos from your phone or camera to a computer, organize them in folders, maybe edit out the bad ones, and then upload them to a shared drive. This takes awhile — likely days have passed before you are ready to share documentation from the workshop.

If your phone automatically syncs photos to the cloud (Dropbox, Google Photos, OneDrive, iCloud all want you to do this) you may think you are ahead of the game. It’s good start as it will let you share photos and videos pretty much immediately. But I want to take it one step further.

I want everything to be in a logical order, annotated, searchable, shareable and be able to mix photos with text and audio notes.

That’s Evernote.

All you need is:

  • A smart phone with the Evernote app on it (and a decent camera). Evernote is on iPhone, Android, Windows and Blackberry.
  • Good typing speed on your phone helps. This takes practice, but the key is to summarize, not capture every word. I’m also a big fan of the swiping keyboards, so you don’t need to mash your thumbs on the screen.

Scenario: You are watching several presentations. (This also works great at conferences.)

  • Create a new notebook for the workshop (or conference).
  • Create a new note per presentation.
  • Snap a photo of the slide as soon as it comes up, then switch to typing in text to capture what is being said that is not on the slide.
  • If the presenter switches slides very quickly you can just keep taking photos, they will be queued up and inserted when you are done taking photos
  • It’s helpful to name/number your notes so they can be view in order (1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.1, 2.3… etc)
  • When teams are doing group work, writing on sheets or walls, wait till they are done and then snap photos of their final work.
  • Put all the notes from the workshop in their own notebook and then share a link to the notebook with the attendees — either invite them through email or publish a publicly viewable web link.
This is what the end result looks like.