Keep Notes Between Your Conversations

Here is a small habit that will make you a noticeably better mentor, and it costs you about four minutes a month.

After each conversation, write three lines somewhere you will actually find them again. What they are working on. What they said they were worried about. What you agreed they would try.

That is it. No system, no app, no template. Three lines.

The reason this matters is that mentoring happens in slices. You talk for half an hour, then a month of your own work happens, and by the next session you have lost the thread. So the conversation restarts. They re-explain their situation, you re-give advice you have already given, and the relationship stays permanently at the surface because you never get past the reintroduction.

With notes, you open with something else entirely. Last time you were nervous about running the design review. How did it go.

Watch what that does to someone. You have just told them that their situation stayed in your head after they left the room. Most people, especially early in their careers, are not used to being remembered by someone more senior. It lands harder than any advice you could give them that day.

The notes do something else too. They let you see the shape of a person over time, which is the thing you cannot get from any single conversation.

You notice that they have mentioned the same blocker three sessions running, which means the advice is not working and you need a different approach rather than a firmer repetition. You notice that they are far braver than they were in March, and you get to tell them so with evidence, which is the single most useful thing you can hand someone who cannot see their own progress.

You notice the pattern they keep apologising for, and you realise it is actually their strength wearing the wrong clothes.

Keep it private, keep it kind, and write it as if they might read it one day.

Attention is the real currency in mentoring, and memory is just attention that survived the month.

Three lines. Do it while the kettle boils.

– Asael Shinder