GoodNotes tips & tricks: How to use GoodNotes as a conference notebook
The situations in which you can use GoodNotes, are almost endless. We’re here to give you a better understanding of how you can get the best out of GoodNotes in some of these situations. Today, we‘ll introduce you to conference note-taking or to be more precise: How you can use GoodNotes as a conference notebook.
Wait, what‘s a conference notebook?
As the name states, a conference notebook is a notebook that you use while attending a conference. It doesn’t only include notes you took during presentations. It rather serves as a collection of all necessary information that is needed before, during, and after the conference.
What you should do before the conference
A few days before the conference, you should prepare your conference notebook in GoodNotes. Create a new notebook in the app and start by adding all important existing information to it. Did you receive an agenda for the conference? Perfect. Add it to your conference notebook and highlight or mark the talks and presentations you want to attend. If it is a larger conference, adding a map of the venue might not be a bad idea so that you can check on the go where you need to attend the next talk or session. Besides the information you get from the conference organizers, we also recommend to add the following templates and pages to your conference notebook:
- A contact template
Don‘t be shy and network. Meeting exciting people is usually the biggest takeaway. Of course, you can also exchange emails and phone numbers or business cards but a contacts template allows you to add some more information to the person you met. We highly recommend adding notes about the reason why you want to follow-up with the person. This can be a spark in any follow-up conversation, especially if you‘re hoping for a favor from your new contact. It shows that you actually care and remember the details you talked about at the conference. You could even take a photo of the business card that you got and add it to the page in your conference notebook, right next to the entry about the respective person.
👆We prepared a free conference contact paper template for your next conference notebook. We added it to the planners & meetings subfolder in our shared template folder online. Enter your email here and we’ll send you a link to access the shared template folder, if you haven‘t done it before.
2. Cornell notes pages
Of course, you need space for all sorts of notes you‘ll be taking during the conference. While you could use blank pages, we recommend becoming familiar with a note-taking system like Cornell notes. With its separate sections, a Cornell note-taking template allows you to add comments and side notes and also summarize notes you took during a presentation. Thus, makes it much easier to review and work with the information after.
3. A To-Do or task list
Some takeaways might be actual tasks that you want to complete later. While most of you probably also use task-management apps, we still recommend adding every conference-related piece of information to the notebook. Keeps things in context.
4. A list of goals and objectives
Most conferences are rather expensive, so you should try to make the most of them. Before the conference starts, write down a list of goals and objectives you have. What do you want to achieve during the conference? Why are you attending? Writing down your goals and objectives is a smart way of keeping yourself accountable to them.
Important tips:
- You can use bookmarks in GoodNotes to create an outline of the whole notebook, which also serves as a shortcut to the single section.
- Here is how to add a document to an existing notebook in GoodNotes.
What you should do during the conference
If there was only one reason why you should use GoodNotes on your iPad to take notes at conferences, it is the option to add photos to your notes. While other participants are busy trying to copy as much as possible from a presenter‘s slide or taking pictures with their phones (and likely forget to review the photos later), you‘ll hold up your iPad and take a photo of the important slide. The photo can either be added as a stand-alone page to your conference notebook or as an image to the current page for further markup. GoodNotes makes it easy to share information. Use the time between the sessions to share information with your friends or co-workers that don‘t attend the conference but are still interested. You can share single or multiple pages with them via email or use the Lasso Tool‘s screenshot feature to capture a part of the page which you can then send via iMessage, for example. Last but not least, take notes and take them the right way.
What you should do after the conference
Overtime is the time to shine. This is where you score the most important points. Same goes for post-processing work after a conference. Review your notes and make sure all open questions you added to the comment section of your Cornell notes have been answered. During the review, you can use GoodNotes‘ handwriting search feature to find information in your notebook. Try searching for the word “Question“, for example, and you‘ll find any instance where you wrote it down in your conference notebook.
Complete and structure the notes. Again, the Lasso Tool will be helpful to create new connections between your notes. You can reorder or even copy and paste things to other pages. If you plan on sharing your notes with someone, the receiver will thank you if s/he receives a well-structured document.
Remember how we recommend writing down to-dos in the conference notebook instead of adding them to another app right away? Go through the tasks one by one and make any necessary edits. If you decide that a task is worth pursuing, use drag & drop to drop it into your task-manager app where your handwriting will magically convert to typed text.
You’re now well equipped for your next conference. We hope that this article inspires you how you can apply GoodNotes in different situations to make your life more convenient. Do you have any other ways how you use GoodNotes for conferences? Share them with us in the comment section.
