#1

Are there other people managers using Obsidian as a PKM? I think there are a set of common use cases that managers share:

  • Keeping running notes from 1x1s which need to have some continuity from meeting to meeting, and which need to be mined for career development and performance management.
  • Managing projects – this is often in an external system, but the practice of checking in and distilling the information, drawing conclusions, and taking action isn’t always well supported by the external system.
  • Tactical planning on a week-to-week or day-to-day process.
  • Strategic planning requiring distilling lots of the information and combining with larger business objectives.
  • Gleaning information from meetings, so many meetings.

I have a bunch of details to get figured out, but one thing I’m really struggling with now is whether to keep standing meetings in a single note with date sections or to make a new note for each instance. The single note becomes enormous over time, but individual notes, make it difficult to keep continuity and answer questions about when certain topics were first introduced and how often they’ve been addressed.

Anyone have a good system for tracking standing meetings and 1x1s?

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#2

Not a people manager myself, but I am interested in quite a few aspects you mention. A few useful practices I picked up over the time:

People

  • every person you regularly interact with gets their own note. Prepend those notes with @ (or another special character of your choice) for easy access via quick switcher/autocompletion. For example: [[@ Jane Doe]]
  • having a note for every person also allows to easily track info about that person via backlinks and/or the graph.
  • use yaml frontmatter to assign additional information to that person, aggregate the info with dataview

meetings

  • I system I find useful are the so-called Cornell Notes. While the original idea is to take notes during a lecture, I think the general concept is suited for most types of “write down things during a meeting/talk”. The idea is to structure notes while you take them. Unfortunately, Cornell Notes relies on a two column system and I haven’t figured out a good system for doing that in Markdown (since tables are still Markdown’s Achilles heel)
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#3

Looking for improvements, but my system is:

  • Each person has a note (Title = name) for general information collection
  • Each meeting has a note, linked to from a list on their page
  • Each project has a note
  • Tasks across the entire system can be tagged with:
    • #to-be-delegated-to-NAME
    • #delegated-to-NAME
    • #agenda-NAME
  • Each of those tags has its own page with a query for open tasks, which I check when creating a meeting agenda

Outside of Obsidian I plan my/the team’s strategic work plans.

#4

I have to fiddle around a bit with running notes vs. one note per meeting, since keeping index notes seems like a lot of work to me. If I can figure out how to have them generated automatically with dataview or something like that then I would feel better about individual notes. The alternative is that end up making a lot of links like [[Running Meeting Name#YYYY-MM-DD]] to refer to the heading of that specific section. If I could make a list of embeds in the contact page then I think that would be a nice way of using a contact page as an index, but IMO the rendering of embeds is really weird, so I don’t use them.

#5

I’m a people manager. I use Agenda for meeting notes. It can’t be beat for that. For project management and general productivity I use an analog Bullet Journal modified to include some parts of GTD.

Obsidian is my PKM but more in the style of Evergreen Notes. I don’t want transient information in here. Obsidian is my long-term memory, so to say.

#6

I’ve got a page for every person, and link to that for every mention of them. In the beginning I maintained things like birthday, hobbies, etc. on that person’s page but realised that
A. I often share my screen with my notes and didn’t want this information to be visible
B. That way of working may not be compliant with GDPR

So now people’s pages just contain very limited information like role.

#7

Not a manager but my system looks a lot like yours. Every project and meetings are notes and they reference each other. I am thinking of implementing a similar system for task stakeholder tracking.
Couldn’t you use nested tags to clarify your tag hierarchy ? I.e. use #to-be-delegated-to/NAME instead of #to-be-delegated-to-NAME. This way you could query across your vault through a generic search (search #to-be-delegated-to for all delegated tasks) or a more focused search (search #to-be-delegated-to/NAME for a specific stakeholder).
That would also allow you to implement a dynamic query on each person’s note with the help of the Tasks plugin to help keep track of things.
That’s just my two cents, like I said I’m not a manager so that might not be practical.

#8

I’ll have to give Agenda a look… but I’d prefer not to add a fourth system (I use OmniFocus for my own task/project tracking and my teams’ deliverables are tracked in a shared system). My running notes need to be distilled into opinions & actions/documentation. Something like ZK where my meeting notes are fleeting notes and I need to process & organize everything from time to time. I used to do this mostly without having to think about it too hard, but as I manage more people it requires progressively more focus.