How many times did you come back from a conference with plenty of ideas and notes, having the motivation to act upon all these as soon as your were back in office? Of course, when you are back, you get trapped with the usual suspects and your notes disappear under the pile of stuff waiting for you.
To increase the chances to act upon your notes, the desired output should be actionable and easy to share with others (for example your supervisor). It should therefore identify clearly what are the next actions (à la GTD) and be easy to navigate so that anyone else could just use it. The goal is to produce a light and lean document that highlights the things you want to remember from a conference. Would there be a template for such thing?
I noticed that some conference participants were keeping notes in a very organised way, as if they were writing an internal memo or report, which I guess nobody actually reads. Maybe more paperwork to justify their trip? I didn’t want that.
The following Smart Conference Take-Away structure is actually the combination of different ideas coming from PhD students I advise (or have advised), Lucio De Fusco, Maxime Pochet, and João Miranda.
You can download the pdf or modify the tex file. Don’t hesitate to leave me a comment if you want to help me improve this.