Yeah. And the nice thing about the information age (do they still call it that? shouldn't they add "2.0" to it somewhere by now?) - is that you're always only a click away from some great distraction from what you should-but-don't-want to do. Like blogs for example. :)

I have had that happen many times. I may be the worst person to give advice, but, what I have done with this type of stuff is similar to David's advice on buying mail order. Tickle it, Let it incubate for a week or two.

When it shows up again to that smarter you with fresh eyes to it, you will see that great pearl of wisdom, or you may just say, wow, what a load of crap and not feel bad about trashing it.

But in the mean time you won't feel the pressure of this looming note processing, you can tickle it and forget it, confident you will see it again. When you are hopefully smarter.

The difficult part for me is evaluating whether the projects (or potential projects) have value at higher altitudes. I've got a couple projects that I've been putting off simply because they don't need to be done soon, and I could probably get away with not doing them altogether.

But if I look at them in light of my roles, responsibilities and long-term goals, they might be worth doing. That said, lately I've been letting them incubate for a week or so at a time like Kevin suggests.

Julie, by the time my meeting notes are more than a week old, I know I'll never get to them, so I just toss them in the recycle bin.

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment...

If you initially took the time to write out 16 PAGES OF NOTES, you OWE it to yourself to review them.
16 PAGES!
If nothing else, reviewing the 16 PAGES! will reinforce to you that quite possibly, maybe, could-be that you take too many notes! (I'm grinning as I type this!)

Thanks everyone. It's been fun to read your comments.

No...I still haven't done anything with the notes but I'm OK with that!

Kelly

I have the same problem with meeting notes. I'm great at taking them but I procrastinate reviewing them. I attend a lot of meetings and have quite a backlog of notes. For me I hope it will work to review one set per day. My notes are just a couple pages though as these are one hour meetings.

For a large set of notes it might work to chunk it down - scheduling 15 minutes to go through them. If you have more to do, schedule another 15 minutes the next day. Sometimes a project like that can get put off because we fear it will suck up too much time. At the end of the 15 minutes you might discover it won't take so much time after all, or maybe that indeed it will take too much time and it's not worth the effort. It's getting started that's the hard part.

I take high level notes - dates, actions, OMIGODs when I am attending a meeting on the fringe. If I know I am going to have action items, I take decent notes. If I am hosting the call, I take very good notes. I usually type them up in an email (decent and very good) and send them to my team and whoever is involved to make sure everyone heard the same thing and agrees with what we have to do. I am a serial scribbler and I have too much paper laying about to not process notes on the same day I attended a meeting.