At Ooligan Press, one of the important things that keeps the press running are notes. Once a week, the entire press meets together to provide updates and share widespread announcements that are relevant to all publishing students. At “Exec,” the purpose is for students to be kept in the know about the state of each book title, and the current work and challenges that each manager and team is dealing with that particular week. When a student first enters the press and is assigned to a particular book team, it can be hard to understand what is happening with other teams, and what projects others are working on. So these weekly updates are a helpful way to see and understand the full work of the press, and it provides opportunities for students to become interested in work outside of their assigned project team.

For these reasons, notes—or “minutes”—are taken and written down by the operations manager (me, in this case), in order to provide a minute by minute update of what happens during Exec. In addition to our weekly Monday Exec meeting, the managers of Ooligan Press also meet on Monday afternoons at a meeting we refer to as “PrOps.” The purpose of PrOps is to be a space where managers can ask questions directly to the publisher and other managers, and bring up issues or problems that could use some group brainstorming. Because of all the inter-department communication, it is especially helpful that notes are also taken during PrOps, since managers can always refer back to them if they forget the answer to a question, or if a manager for some reason needs to miss PrOps.

When it comes to the actual process of note-taking, I would never have thought of myself as a particularly good note-taker before becoming the operations manager. I still wouldn’t really call myself a good note-taker. But in a weird way, that makes me feel like the tips and tricks that I have learned are especially helpful since I’m coming from a layperson’s perspective, rather than from an expert’s one. I currently have two tips that I think have made my note-taking infinitely better now (spring 2025, my graduating term), compared to when I first started taking notes in spring 2024.

#1. Breadth over specificity

In my opinion (subject to change), I find that if I had to pick between being hyper-specific, versus encompassing the gist of what a manager says in their update (I’m usually able to write more of what they said with this second option), I usually pick the latter. I think in general people think “quality over quantity” and yes, that is true to an extent. It’s better to have well-taken notes, versus gobbledygook that no one can use. However, the target audience of these notes predominantly include publishing professionals. To me, I find it more helpful to be reminded of everything I said during an update, versus having only three things I said to be memorialized very specifically. 

#2. When in doubt, use “working on _____”

Part of what makes note-taking so challenging for myself is that I find it really hard to focus on what people are saying for a prolonged period of time. Even in conversations or pieces of media that I really enjoy, if it starts to approach five minutes of me having to focus on listening to auditory information without any pause, I can’t seem to keep my focus on the auditory input. So, taking notes presents a challenge in that I find it fairly difficult to comprehend and retain what people are saying during Exec and PrOps. Like alluded to earlier as well, I find it more beneficial to quickly note down a person’s general point. So, in order to save time and make sure I don’t forget what people say during Exec or Ops, I often just shorten the note to simply “working on ____”

For operations, taking notes is more of an art than a skill. While there are tips and tricks that I can use and teach to others, a lot of what makes a better note-taker is simply practice.

— Kara Herrera