Secret tips to make meeting notes your superpower 🦸‍♂️

Ah, meetings! Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

We’ve spent years perfecting a meeting tool for Confluence teams and it has taught us one thing: people fear the unorganized content dump that accumulates over time, making it hard to find useful notes when needed. 

At Meetical we’ve created an ultimate guide on turning meetings into your superpower. From various elements of Confluence meeting notes to templates and integrations—it covers everything. 🥸

Read it here: Confluence Meeting Notes – The Ultimate Guide

But if you’re looking to simply find some smart tricks to elevate your meeting game, we’ve got you covered. Read on to learn some less known Confluence tips & secret tricks👇

1. Confluence + Calendar = Magic

Meetings can get messy if you are not on top of your schedules—you start Monday with one meeting and realize you have 20 more to finish by Friday! One of the smartest and easiest ways to organize meetings is by integrating Confluence meeting pages with your and the participants’ calendars. 

 

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Image: Meetical Confluence Calendar in Action - Integrates with both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365

After creating the meeting page, add a link to the page in the calendar invite. This way, all the participants will be notified and get an easily accessible meeting link in their calendars. With the Meetical Meetings App, the free Chrome extension, and the free Outlook add-in, you can greatly simplify and automate the process for any meeting, especially those with a lot of participants. Making Confluence meetings simpler and more powerful has been one of our core goals at Meetical from day 1.

2. Don't ignore the labels 

With too many meetings, it becomes difficult to find the right one at the right time. But there’s a way to bring order to the chaos: labels! 

To organize meeting notes and make them easily searchable, use labels. You can think of labels as tags that allow you to filter pages and templates according to the specs. 

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Image: You can add labels to both pages and templates. All pages created from a template will inherit their labels!

You can add specific labels to pages or even directly in a template. All pages created from the template will automatically carry the same labels.

3. Maintain privacy with page and space restrictions 

Confluence, at its heart, is a wiki created for knowledge sharing. But some meetings require privacy and you can easily change permissions for each meeting note page.

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Image: Use restrictions for private meetings, such as 1-on-1 meetings

Go to the parent page and change restrictions to let the right people in. On top of that, you can make your personal space private and use it for note-taking and brain dumps.

4. Make action items stand out

The ideal meetings should have quantifiable outcomes and that's where action items come into the picture in Confluence. 

You can customize how you want to complete the action items so that they stand out within notes. You can edit the meeting page, add symbols, change colors and formats and even link the result for better clarity. 

Screenshot 2022-09-14 at 15.20.49.pngImage: Using Confluence Tasks in a creative way to document results

In a nutshell, don't forget to highlight the action item outcomes. Simply edit the page, choose a color with bold text, and add your comment before checking off the item. 

5. Bring Jira to the fold

Confluence is great on its own, but when you combine it with Jira, you unlock productivity nirvana. Jira issues macro is a handy macro that will automate and structure most of the tasks for you.

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Image: Macros with Jira Reports in Confluence

You can integrate action items with both Jira tasks and Jira tickets. Link the Confluence task only when it aligns with the issue, otherwise, we recommend you to link directly to the specific Jira issues, without creating a Confluence task.

6. Powerful search requires detailed content

Labels work great in Confluence when it comes to structured reports. But many users rely on full-text search only, because the platform has an amazing search mechanism. It's powerful, fast, and intuitive. So keep this in mind while noting down the meeting discussions. 

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Image: Keep full-text search in mind when writing down information in Confluence

Here are some ideas for you to get started: include the person or company's name in the title and notes, include keywords in meeting goals, and populate the sections with related keywords. This way, you and your colleagues will be able to search and find the exact section of a meeting page. 

7. Get a headstart 

As a meeting leader and active participant, your work starts way before the meeting starts. Think of each meeting as a mini-project! Go through the brief, prepare an overview, complete the agenda, finish your preparation tasks and analyze the inputs provided by others. It's good for everyone to prepare 10 minutes before the meeting starts. 

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Image: The Meetical App can generate a table with a row for each @participant to notify them and gather async input.

Remember that your Confluence page is also great to prepare the meeting and get input from participants and stakeholders. You can mention anyone on the page, add due dates to track preparation tasks and use Meetical to automatically generate recurring meeting notes and automatically generate participant lists.

Over to you

Did you like any of these tips that might help you conduct better meetings? What are the underrated tips you're using in your organization? Comment below about your meeting notes tips & tricks, and let's discuss how Confluence (and Meetical) is helping you be a superhero!

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