Let's face the facts: so many of us have lousy memories. To be fair, in today's world we suffer from information overload, or what productivity expert Darren Hardy calls "infobesity." It's simply impossible to remember everything.
A study done by two British psychologists, J. Blackburn and EJ Lindgren, revealed some interesting statistics regarding meetings. They tape-recorded a discussion at the end of a Cambridge Psychological Society meeting.
Two weeks later they asked the attendees to write down whatever they could recall about the discussion. The results were telling:
- The average number of points remembered by each person was only 8.4% of those actually recorded.
- 42% of the items remembered were incorrectly remembered — and substantially so.
- Many of the things "remembered" were not said at all or were said on some other occasion.
If this doesn't demonstrate the need for written summaries, I don't know what does.
Fix: Have minutes of the meeting distributed with all essential dates, numbers, and the overall action plan.