Brian's ICA Blog

I have heard a few students asking for suggestions on managing the large amount of documentation and course notes we have to printout.

There is the need to keep course notes separated from the documents that we will use to help structure our Coaching model.  These documents may also be used in the day to day running of our Coaching Businesses.

Managing the Course Study Notes

1)  What I have done here is to buy some ring binders, 3 ring or 4 ring design works best.  Stay away from the 2 ring design, the pages tend to flop around a bit more.  What I use inside the binders are clear plastic page holders or protectors.  These are sealed except for the opening at the top.    Get the binders that have the pocket on the outside that is the full size of the binder.  You can put a title page in this pocket so you can quickly identify what’s in that binder.

Note: Be sure you put the opening of the page holders at the top too… otherwise when you pick up the ring binder all your notes and hard work you just did to put the documents in the plastic page holders will end up in a heap on the floor… trust me on this one, and no… I’m not going to tell you why I know this… I don’t look very good in that story!  I think you get the picture.

2)  The nice thing about using the plastic page holders is that you can see what’s in each one.  I put 1 set of course notes in each page holder, FC101 in the first one, FC102 in the next one… and so on.  As you take each class, the notes are easy to take out of the binders by taking them out of the plastic page holder and you can also put the hand written notes you took during the class back in the same page holder your class note are kept in.  I keep the hand written notes behind the main notes so that I can quickly see the course numbers on the front of the course notes page and all the documents for that class are located in the one place.  Some of the courses have too many documents to fit in one page holder, so just use two page holders for that course.

3)  I use a separate ring binder for each course segment… that is… FC100 Foundation, AC100 Advance Coach I and so on.  This way all the notes for one segment are kept together.  I also print a page with a nice logo, I used the ICA logo but you could use your own Coaching business logo as well.  I then write the course segment on the front with a section to write in the start date and the finish date.   Then put this page in the outside pocket of the ring binder.  this way you can easily identify whats in the binder and you will also know which way is up for the binder.  Why do you need to know which way is up?  trust me, you do… see the note above for more details.

4)  Use another ring binder for miscellaneous notes and ICA documents not related to the courses.

Let your imagination run wild here, you can use page tags or coloured page inserts to separate each set of course notes.  Don’t use coloured plastic page holders as you won’t be able to see the documents easily.

Please let me know if you think this helps you or you can post your own ideas here to help others.