Doodles or Data: A Conference Note Survival Guide

Before you get started

This article is a companion to my article on how to get the most out of Conference and Industry events. While most of the concepts here will not require external explanation, some things will be linked to subsections in my article, “Ripe for the Picking: Maximize your Conference ROI” and you may benefit from skimming that piece for context or discussion.  

This article is about the importance of good notetaking including a demonstration of one of the methods I personally use. I have a lightweight template in OneNote that I’ve scrubbed for your use and you can download that here. We will also use a fair amount of genAI through ChatGPT.  

As with most things from Rising Tide, this document is not dictatorial. We feel everything evolves and the goal for this was to be an easy tool that can be implemented with little effort. If you have feedback or questions or just want to argue, feel free to find me on LinkedIn or the MSPGeek Discord community (@cinakur) and I’ll be glad to chat!

Why take notes? This isn’t school.  

I was a poor student in school, ironically driven but unmotivated. I knew I wanted to make a difference in the world, and that was it. I didn’t even plan on getting an Engineering degree. My family was lower-middle class in a rural town in the southeast United States that sprung up around an Air Force Base 80 years ago. I was the first on both sides of the family to go straight from high school to college, so I had no context or support about what it would take to be a Doctor, Lawyer, or even Engineer. I thought maybe I’d just get some vague Liberal Arts degree and become a teacher or get married and be a mom. Nothing bad about being a teacher or a mother, I still could see myself being both one day: it’s just that I had no dreams of my own, no direction or understanding. I thank all that is good in this world that college counselor looked at my SAT scores and was surprised I wasn't already pursuing something explicitly science and math focused!

While I say I was a poor student, I did receive good grades in basic classes and hands-on labs as I am a generally curious person, so talking about theory, tangible experience, and writing about it carried me a long way. However, as classes advanced from practical to theoretical, I rarely operated well under pressure and had poor time management so I would often fail homework and mid-term exams. When my Master’s Thesis was due, an advisor of mine chided me, noting I should be much further along in my research and analysis and questioning if I’d even make the deadline to defend it that year. (His talking-to was the motivation I needed to complete, even if I was doing it out of spite.)

School was miserable, sitting at a desk for hours a day was miserable: there were a million other things I could be doing and were already thinking about as I am half listening to a tenured professor drone on about whatever heady topic the syllabus offered.

Did my notes in those classes carry me through? I think back to them and I can clearly see in my mind’s eye: a doodle I made of my water chemistry professor as a lobster from 17 years ago. So, I guess you can say, yes, they carried me, but probably not for the right reason.

So why am I, an admittedly poor student, writing a blog post about note-taking? How did I even get out of college with two degrees? And why a lobster!?

Well, here’s the thing: with each exam I took, and with each hands-on lab, I finally understood the concept. Something about the adrenaline and skills that I needed to perform helped the concepts solidify in my mind, and eventually I even had enough confidence to tutor others in those courses!  

The key was, and is, action.

It’s easy to freeze after a conference. You’ve taken in so much information: new names, new faces, new products, new settings, new experiences. Hopefully, most are good, but maybe some are bad. How do you KNOW what action to take, how do you even remember?

In this article, we’re going to talk about one way to create meaningful plans of action through note-taking at conferences, using the template that I created as a guide. We’ll look at our notes according to the lifecycle of your conference attendance: choosing the event, attending, and after. For this article, I’m going to use the two examples, one of planning to attend CodeMash, Home - CodeMash., following their 2025 event, and the other with my actual notes from Right of Boom 2025.

Let’s start at the beginning.  

El’s Template Overview: A Walkthrough

Before getting into how I use the template, let’s go over what is in it and my thought process behind it.  

Did you download it yet? You can get that OneNote file here: Conference Note Template. (Contact me if you want a different type of export!)

The key thing about building with action in mind is that I bookend my trip with intentional processing and preparation so I can enjoy the event with confidence, knowing I am being responsible with my time, skill, and relationships. There are three main parts to the thought process that governed my template: 

1. Know Your Why. Expending mental energy at the beginning reduces the number of decisions and subsequent decision fatigue you'll experience on-site. Set the vision upfront and it will go a long way.
2. Keep it Simple. You want something you can return to throughout the conference, without "debt" or guilt. Giving yourself something easy to come back to as a touch point and "source of truth" will make this more attainable.
3. Be Accountable and Finish Strong. Have a dedicated time to synthesize and analyze what you've learned and what your next steps are!

I personally do this by bookending my trip with 1-hour on each side: the hour before I plan my goals, and the hour after I summarize and make an action plan. Considering a conference with travel is easily a 40-60 hour week (and longer for vendors!), 2-hours is a small investment on the success of my conference attendance from a content perspective.  

If we’re looking for direction on action at the end of this, we need to know where to find certain things we talked about, and that is all this OneNote template is. So, let's take a look! If you'd like to follow along, I have screenshots that follow as well as a video I recorded, available here: A Conference Note Survival Guide.

I like to have a Conferences Notebook shared between the team, and for each conference I add a Section Group, with the given year as a Section. So I copy parts of my template to the given location as needed.  

Within the template, you will find four main sections:  

• Conference Overview

• Session Notes

• Networking

• Vendors

Let’s talk about each section and how they’re used.  

Conference Overview  

The point of this page is to visualize what success looks like for this conference, personally and as a team. You’ll find there are a lot of questions on this first page. You don’t have to answer all of them, but asking them ahead of time will give you some clarity on the type of questions you could be asking to get the most out of this event.

Session Notes  

Session Notes are broken up into two parts: Agenda and Session Notes.  

Agenda

Make an Agenda page for each team member attending so you can compare sessions, notes, and ask questions!

Session Notes

Session Notes are for the actual Session Notes. Even if you don't take notes or even attend the session, you can fill in things you hear other people mention about it down the road!

Yes, more questions for you to ask.  These are helpful when you do some AI analysis at the end.

Networking  

Networking should be lightweight! You're going to meet a ton of people, quickly. Keep it at a high level as much as possible.

Vendors

Vendors should generally be separate from your Networking so can have a place for notes about their product that aren't related to them personally.

Before you go: Know your Why.

Now that we have the lay of the land for the template, let's set up our example of attending Codemash 2025 (CodeMash).

We create the new Section for this event and copy in the template pages.

Now, the work starts. For me, I like to give myself one-hour to work this through. It’s enough time to do research and not too much time that I feel like I’m getting in the weeds.  

Set the Course: What's your Why? 

If you read the article this is a companion to, you know I think setting your intentions for a conference is the foremost important thing to accomplish once you decide you’re going.  

So, tell me, why do you want to attend CodeMash?

• My friends are all going and I’d like to see them.  

• There is a certain topic on the schedule I want to learn about.  

• [Semi-famous Person] will be speaking.

• Networking with new people or people in a specific industry.  

• Some other secret reason.  

Do you have clear reasons you want to attend? Take a look at the Agenda from a high level or ask around. Maybe it’s worth asking a generative AI to help frame this. Perhaps ask, “Why should I, as an MSP (or individual, or business, depending on the data you’ve fed your AI!), want to attend Codemash?”

It’ll likely give you a bunch of reason, and while these are all probably valid to some degree, limit it to 1-2 main reasons and let the rest be a bonus. Review the website for vendors and key speakers that are meaningful to you. Fill out this section on the Conference Overview page.  

Fully Review the Agenda.

Now, it's time to review the conference agenda a little more thoroughly. Which sessions do you want to attend? Here is their 2025 Agenda for context: 2025 CodeMash Conference

Fill those in on the Agenda page. Each team-member attending can have their own Agenda page so you can see what courses everyone else is taking and divide and conquer the session topics, or take joint notes on the same document and fill in each others’ blanks.  

And add the Description and key notes to a new page in that section. Read the questions in the Session Notes section and write out your OWN questions of what you'd like to learn in this session based on your understanding of the Summary.

Rinse and Repeat until you have a full schedule. Be sure to put breaks in there occasionally for client calls or for serendipitous hallway meetings!

Some of these sessions, I won’t be taking active notes in (like the soldering course) but may want to have somewhere to dump resources or other notes afterwards! There may be a few different days that I jump into lightning talks, so I group them all together, they don’t need separate pages!  

Got it? 

The main things to remember here echo the blog post on conferences.  

• Determine your why by seriously evaluating the agenda, determining your goals, and talking with your team about their own.  

• Pre-prep what you can so you don’t have to make too many live decisions.  

• Don’t overcrowd it. Make sure you’re not overcommitting!  

One more thing I pre-prep to help keep my focus: I travel with my work laptop but I do not take it to the sessions. Instead, I take a lightweight tablet. This allows me to focus on what I’m here for: networking and learning and not answering emails or surreptitiously working on projects.  

Boots on the ground: Capture Insights, be Present.

Time to actually take notes. At this point, we'll transition from planning the CodeMash trip to looking at my actual experience at Right of Boom this past year. Depending on your situation, you may or may not have the time or space to take “good” notes. I generally find myself in one of two situations:  

• Session Notes: Sitting in a session with a tablet in front of me, able to take thoughtful notes

• Conversation Notes: Standing in a hallway, at a meal, or in other fast-paced Conversations, where I’m unable to take good notes, if any. Sometimes I have half notes on a Notes app or something because I don’t want to forget.  

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In general, focus on the main things and let noise drift to the side. Here is some advice I have for handling each of these situations, and examples of how I handled them while at Right of Boom this past February.  

Session Notes

In general, any live note-taking completed by you should be about action, not mindless transcription. There are AI transcribers like Otter.ai or Plaud.ai for that. Your goal should be three-fold: 

1. gathering the big points and the nuance of the conversation
2. collecting data points and future research opportunities and
3. identifying how those fit in with your goals or understanding.

Keep your notes high-level; focus on engaging in the sessions and ask questions. Write just enough to help jog your memory or find the source information later. If you wrote out your own questions in the planning phase, those can help guide your notes as well, or give you questions to ask when they open up the mic.

Here is a snippet from my notes I took in Brent Adamson’s session on the Framemaking Sale.  

As you see in my notes here, yes, take photos, but where do those go when you’re done? Do you review them? Really?  

Put that information somewhere useful, friend. Here are few things you can do to help shape your notes:  

• Use OCR. The notes under Dimensions of Customer Decision Confidence, I did not type. I took a photo and then grabbed the text from that image. Your device may have OCR built into the camera app.   ‍
• Use Reverse Image Search. Find Images online that speakers referenced, through reverse image search. They will be better quality AND will often bring you to the source material the speaker used.  
• Capture concepts that will be hard to track down later. Did they mention a data point or statistic? What was the source for that? What was the exact number? 
• What do you think? What concepts do you agree with? What do you disagree with? What makes you feel uncomfortable? What do you want to learn more about? ‍
• Review before you leave your seat. Before getting up from a session, take 5 minutes and catch up on your notes. Don’t make a big deal of it, it doesn’t have to be perfect, just scrub through them to make sure they’ll make sense for “future you” when it’s time to review them.

Conversation Notes

Taking notes on conversations is a lot harder. Who did you talk to and what did you talk about? Where were you? What actionable things can you remember, jokes, or meaningful things about that situation?  

The Networking and Vendor sections are a lot lighter because they should be. Hopefully, you are living in the moment and connecting with these thoughts and ideas you discussed over a meal and worrying less about getting notes from these experiences. The point of these notes are to remind yourself of the important stories or experiences you had with someone, to build camaraderie and sometimes wise insight that these strangers-turned-friends-and-colleagues shared with you.  

For conversation notes, I would encourage you to take notes you can, by texting or sending yourself a brief message through Teams/Slack, or recording a voice memo. Sometimes, I also just message my business partner if it’s a particularly lovely exchange.  

Also, make sure you connect with that person, by social media, email, or business card. As with the Session Notes, triage throughout the day, or at the very least at the end of the day/beginning of the next to make sure all of your notes end up in one place.  

These are my notes from a recent conference, with enough redacted so you can see what I do, but enough showing so you can see I am not perfect or 100%. I didn't fill in some of the blanks as I've mentioned in later segments, I’m not building dossiers, I’m only writing out just enough information to jog my memory. Some of the experiences were highly memorable, so the names were enough.

In the end, the most important thing for your notes is that they are here for you to return to at any time during the conference. If you’ve done the pre-work of laying it out, you don’t have to expend energy to get back on track. You just find the next session or meal and pick it back up again.  

Transition Power Hour: Prioritize and Process  

It’s the last day of the conference. You are exhausted and it’s time to pack up and hit the road.

I’d argue that THIS is the most important time in this entire document, this liminal space between education and action that will determine if you actually learn anything from this event!  

Before things get “Back to Normal,” it is vital that you take the time to review your notes, whether alone or as a team. Here’s how I do it:  

• Give yourself One Hour (or less) to Clean up.
  Before heading home or within 24 hours of landing back in reality, spend one dedicated hour to intentionally review your notes. This isn’t deep work, it’s just filling in the blanks where you forgot or didn’t have time/energy to upkeep things.  

• Fill in missing details. While things are still fresh, make sure there are enough notes to make your notes make sense. Take out things that don’t make sense or that aren’t actually actionable or useful.  

• Highlight key takeaways that actually matter. (Do this by hand before running through genAI! Don’t let a robot tell you what was important from your experience!)

• Extract action items. Do this religiously, even if it's just "Follow up with $Name from $Company." Add them to a separate, trackable document: 
  • in a project management tool like Trello or Clickup,
  • a Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS) like Logseq, or even
  • your PSA.

• Use genAI to organize and identify the big ideas. On each page of this document, I have questions. Drop the summary and your notes for each session in a genAI of your choice and have it analyze the event for you. Then, at the end, have it analyze the conference as you attended it!

Here is what I distilled the Business Track at Right of Boom into.  

I fed genAI each session with a few questions, and then fed the outputs together into genAI for the "Big Ideas" and then I edited them down and removed 2-3 points and subpoints I felt were unneccesary.

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Back to Reality: Notes into Action.

There it is, you have your nice, neat notes reflecting what you learned at a Conference! Now...what...what do you do with them?  

Share the Knowledge with your Team

• What sessions were actually valuable? (And which were a waste of time?)

• Is this a good event for you to attend again next year, or is there someone else who would be a better fit?  

• What key industry trends did you notice?

• Are there any immediate action items?

• If you can present ONE THING to implement immediately, what would it be? Make a plan to do it.  

Follow Up with Friends, new and old.  

Debrief with your friends who also attended. What did they get out of the event that you missed? Be ruthless about which product you’re going to try from which vendor following this event and stick with it. Go ahead and write up a short “sorry not interested, do not contact" template email to send to vendors, or email rules to send them to another folder/trash. (You can always come back to them, give them a clear templated no and move on!)

Share the knowledge with others.  

I mean, my notes from Right of Boom literally led to two (maybe three) blog posts on getting the most out of conferences, a video, and probably a webinar reviewing content as well. There is a depth of knowledge that comes from diverse conversations on topics, don’t be scared to have opinions or speak your mind, you never know how that can help our entire industry in the long run! Make videos, blogposts, or LinkedIn Articles. Share the wealth with others who couldn’t make it. Who knows, it may be helpful to you, to help you sort out your ideas better.  

In Closing

My goal in sharing with you how I take conferences notes, is to encourage YOU to get the most out of your conference attendance. However you do that is up to you, but hopefully this framework helps you practically implement how you can best ideate, execute, and close out your event experiences with Action in mind. Remember: 

1. Know your Why before you go and invest energy upfront to give yourself structure you can use.
2. Keep it Simple and come back to Notes whenever you stray.
3. Finish Strong and transition back to reality, prioritizing Action.

If you take nothing else, I hope you consider that a conference isn’t just about showing up. Instead, it’s about capturing insights, making connections, and turning those ideas into action. Take notes that matter, review them before they fade into oblivion, and for the love of all things good, do something with them!

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