A beautiful bind: Create a veterinary conference notebook

All photos by Sarah Mouton DowdyAs an LVT and CVPM, I need to complete an average of 34 continuing education hours every year. With so many conferences to attend, people to meet and lectures to absorb, I used to get overwhelmed-emphasis on used to.

Bind the gap

My former approach was to organize my conference loot upon returning to my office. I would shuffle through myriad pamphlets and business cards and attempt to decipher my hurried, illegible notes. In an ongoing effort to keep my desk reasonably tidy, most of the above would end up in the trash (along with my ability to reference anything I'd learned).

However, when I noticed a fellow conference attendee taking notes along the edge of a printed proceedings paper for the lecture we were attending, I was struck by how much more efficient her approach was than my muddled attempts to jot down everything from the PowerPoint slides. That's when I came up with the idea for a conference notebook.

Bind tricks

I now prepare a three-ring binder for every conference I attend, and I do so before the event instead of after. Its contents include:

Two or three pages of business card sleeves

Personalized schedule

Proceedings papers for every lecture I plan to attend in chronological order and separated by day with dividers

Scratch paper

Several clear plastic sleeves for holding exhibitor information sheets and pamphlets.

I use a different color of notebook for every conference. Later on, while I may not remember the exact conference at which I learned about a new employee compensation program, I do remember the information I need is in an orange notebook and can lay my hands on it with little struggle. I feel like I'm finally getting my money's worth out of every conference and no longer worry that I've thrown away something useful.

Put yourself (and your staff) in a bind

All in all, each notebook takes about two hours to create, but the time and energy they save me later on (in addition to the exponential increase in information retention) makes them a worthwhile investment. I believe in this process so much that I now make a notebook for all team members before they attend a conference.

Editors' note: Want to see an example of what this looks like all put together? So did we! Click to the next page for CVC binder inspiration ...

We clearly marked the outside of the binder with the conference's name, date and location. You can also mark the spine in the same way for easy access when it's on your shelf.

Ahhh ... isn't organization beautiful? We've tucked the full conference schedule in the front inside sleeve and created a personalized schedule to keep ourselves on track. You'll also see a fresh pad of notebook paper peeking out the back inside sleeve.

No more purses or pockets full of business cards.

You can access the proceedings papers for all CVC conferences before you go.

These extra sleeves are great for holding brochures, pamphlets and doodles. (What's a doodle, you ask? Visit dvm360.com/cvcdoodles for some visual learning!)