Virtual or not, you know that you are still working with an entire office. This means that every meeting has to be properly documented so that you and your virtual team know where you all are and where you are going. And just like any office, there has to be someone who keeps track of all those meetings that you’ve had.

Fortunately or unfortunately for you – completely depending on your taste – you have been assigned by your virtual team the grand virtual office job of taking meeting notes. Your team leader tells you to keep track of all discussions, plans and major group decisions and compile them in reports on a regular basis. Furthermore, you are instructed to keep an archive of all presentations and pertinent materials and documents that other team members share during these meetings. Not only that, you also have to post these things in your team blog after you prepare the notes for next meeting’s agenda. Are you excited?

But even if you’re not the virtual office secretary, you still have to take notes every now and then. You should keep in mind that it’s still for your benefit. So keep telling yourself that you won’t remember everything you’ll hear in the meeting and get ready to take notes.

Obviously you are going to have to complete your checklist before any meeting comes up – you don’t want to be running around buying equipment and downloading software minutes before the meeting. Of course, you also need the basic equipment for these virtual meetings, and now that you have a new task at hand you have to make sure the hardware doesn’t have the kind of quality that will make you think they will conk out in the middle of a meeting. If this happens, you will miss a lot!

Secondly, keep in your application inventory helpful recording equipment. Not all meetings are purely instant messaging. Some of them might have lots of visuals and live discussions. Try to keep with you a nice and easy to use audio recording application that can go on for hours just in case you need to transcribe discussions. If there’s a video involved, ask for copies and download them. The same goes for sound slides and presentations. These things are especially important when your virtual team works heavily with graphic designs.

You don’t always have to keep everything in check, since it all depends on what your team leaders asks you to do. But what’s important to remember is that the virtual assistant job of note taking is more than just a pen and paper task.