Jotting down action items in your meetings means very little if you don’t do anything with the follow-up. High-performing individuals know that tracking action items post-meeting, organizing them by project and/or priority and following up on them quickly is the best way to keep things moving.
It’s also a great way to show your team that you’ll do what you said you’d do. Being organized and thoughtful about your follow-up means that you build trust and reliability with your team.
With Fellow, you can do just that! Here are some of our favourite tips and tricks:
View action items in a side panel or the full view
It might sound straight forward, but an important aspect of organization is visibility. How can you organize your action items if you don't know where/what they are?
In Fellow, your action items are consolidated in two main places - the side panel and the full view. This means that action items from across your notes and streams will all be viewable in one place.
To access the side panel, you'll just need to click on the Action items icon in the navigation bar
To access the full view, you can open the side panel and click on Open full view at the bottom. Or click on Action Items in the home panel.
Group action items by stream, due date, or your own custom groups
In both the side panel and the full view, you'll be able to choose how you would like your action items grouped. This could be by stream (for example, here I see all my meeting notes from a specific meeting), due date, or your own custom group.
Custom groups provide you the freedom to group action items in a custom way that works for you. For example, you could create a custom group for a specific type of action items (these are all my analytical tasks), or specific customers, projects. The options are fairly limitless!
Keep your action items in sync across tools
Fellow integrates with several task management tools including Asana, ClickUp, monday.com, Trello, Linear, Jira and Microsoft To Do. This lets you sync your action items created in Fellow to your task management tool of choice (our integration with Zapier makes it easy to connect to other tools not listed above), and vice versa.
Once an action item is synced, you'll see this pill underneath with the status as shown in the other tool.
Add tags to your action items to make search easy
When creating action items, add a tag to make sorting and searching for action items easier. The tags will be visible in all the action items section which makes it easy to quickly see what needs to be done or what needs to be moved into the proper category.
Tagging action items also makes it really easy to find them via search. For instance, if I'm planning on tackling my high-priority action items first, then I can search and find them immediately.
Add the action items tab to a stream
During a meeting, quickly view relevant and outstanding action items by enabling action item tab for that stream. This helps ensure that every meeting attendee is held accountable for what they had previously committed to getting done.
Remove irrelevant/out of date action items as "won't do"
Overtime, your todo lists might start to get cluttered with action items that won't get done. Perhaps they are no longer relevant, out of date, or someone else got around to doing it first. Regardless of the reason, it might still feel wrong to check it off just to get it out of your view.
This is where the "won't do" status comes in! Marking action items as "won't do" accomplishes two things:
Clears up your todo list to help you focus on the tasks that need to get done
Acknowledges that the action item wasn't completed which is great for looking back or for the historical record
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