Meeting Notes

Meeting Notes — Make the Meeting Count

The meeting just ended. Pull the decisions and the why, assign the actions with owners and real dates, flag what's still open, and ship a record someone who missed it can act on.

You own the point-in-time meeting record: take a transcript or raw notes, separate signal from noise, and emit a curated artifact — decisions (with rationale), action items (owner + due date), open questions, and a one-screen TL;DR. The output is human-readable judgment, not a code file.

Not this skill

The capture loop

This is the spine. Six steps, in order:

1. Consent & setup — if it's being recorded, announce it and get consent before capture (see Consent below). Note attendees, date, purpose.
2. Capture in real time — record context → decision → action as the discussion happens. Don't reconstruct from memory hours later; you'll lose the why and invent the rest. (Umbrex, accessed 2026-06-02.)
3. Sort signal from noise — a useful record filters to decisions, commitments, and open questions. It is not a transcript. (Fellow.app / VoiceType, accessed 2026-06-02.)
4. Extract decisions + actions + open questions — into the skeleton below.
5. Verify — confirm each owner accepts their task while everyone is still present. For AI drafts this step is mandatory and heavier (see Working with AI transcripts).
6. Ship the recap within 24–48h — as a draft, invite corrections, then finalize. (VoiceType / Wrike, accessed 2026-06-02.)

Your first move depends on the source. Branch here:

The record skeleton

Curated record, not a transcript (don't dump the conversation flow). Canonical sections, in this order:

# <Meeting> — <Date>
**Attendees:** Ana, Marc, Júlia (note-taker: Ana) · **Purpose:** decide Q3 launch scope

## TL;DR
One screen the absent can act on: we cut feature X from the launch, Marc owns the
go/no-go by Jun 12, payments integration is still open.

## Decisions
- Cut feature X from the Q3 launch. *Why:* QA can't cover it in time; ships in Q4.
  *Reversibility:* partially-reversible (re-add in Q4). Dissent: Júlia wanted a flag.

## Action items
- [ ] Spike the Stripe webhook retry — Marc — by Tue Jun 9
- [ ] Send revised launch scope to stakeholders — Ana — by Thu Jun 11

## Open questions
- Who signs off on the payments contract? (raised by Marc, unresolved)

## Parking lot
- Revisit pricing tiers next sync (not in scope today)

Four filled versions of this skeleton — decision meeting, standup/sync, retro, 1:1 — plus copy-paste action-item and decision rows are in references/templates.md.

Action items done right

A complete action item is verb, owner, by <real date>: verb-first ("Draft…", "Spike…", "Send…", "Confirm…"), one named person — not "the team", not "we", since shared ownership means nobody owns it — and a real date ("by Tue Jun 9", never "next week", "soon", or "ASAP"). Explicit dates and named owners raise completion and ownership. (Umbrex, accessed 2026-06-02.)

Bad → Good:

Verbal-confirm before the meeting ends. Ask each owner to confirm they accept the task while everyone is still present. (Umbrex, accessed 2026-06-02.) An unaccepted task is a wish.

Add a status field ([ ] open / [~] in progress / [x] done) so the same record can be re-read as a tracker until the tasks migrate to project-ops.

Add RACI only when ownership is genuinely contested — a cross-team decision with unclear accountability. Don't bolt a Responsible/Accountable/Consulted/Informed grid onto a five-person standup; it's overhead nobody reads.

Decisions + the one-line why

For each real decision capture three things:

1. The decision — what was decided, stated as a fact.
2. One sentence of why — the trade-off or context. Every major decision gets one; a decision with no why rots, and six weeks later nobody remembers what trade-off it solved. (Umbrex / Fellow.app, accessed 2026-06-02.)
3. Dissent or unresolved issue — if someone disagreed or it's conditional, note it. A record that hides dissent will be re-litigated.

Tag each decision by reversibility — reversible / partially-reversible / irreversible — as a single field. Reversible calls can be made fast on imperfect info; irreversible ones warrant slowing down and recording more context, and the tag helps later review. (fs.blog / Reflect OS, accessed 2026-06-02.)

Bad → Good:

When a decision needs the full ADR — alternatives weighed, reversibility argued, a review date — that is decision-records' job. Capture it here in context, then hand it off. Don't grow an ADR inside the meeting notes.

Working with AI transcripts

AI transcripts hallucinate and misattribute speakers, and even strong ASR is not error-free — Whisper reports ~2.5–3% word error on clean read speech (LibriSpeech test-clean) and ~4.7% on TED talks (TED-LIUM), and real meeting audio with crosstalk and accents is worse. A human verification pass is mandatory before any task or quote ships. (OpenAI Whisper, Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision, arXiv 2212.04356, https://cdn.openai.com/papers/whisper.pdf, accessed 2026-06-02.) Never let an AI-extracted action item or quote go out unverified against the source.

Run three checks before you trust a draft:

1. Speaker attribution — does each commitment trace to the right person? AI notetakers swap speakers, especially on overlapping talk or after a silence.
2. Hallucinated task — does each action item correspond to something actually said? If you can't find it in the audio/transcript, drop it or flag it — don't ship it.
3. Quote vs. source — any verbatim quote you keep must match the source. Paraphrase if unsure; never present an unverified quote as exact.

When a line is suspect, flag it for verification rather than asserting it — and never invent a missing owner or date. The full checklist is in references/templates.md.

Consent & confidentiality

Recording a conversation carries real legal and confidentiality exposure. (Justia, Recording Phone Calls and Conversations — 50-State Survey, https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-calls-and-conversations/, accessed 2026-06-02; ABA GPSolo eReport "AI and You", Sept 2025.)

• Announce + get consent before recording. Roughly a dozen US states require all-party (two-party) consent — per Justia's 50-state survey, CA, CT, DE, FL, IL, MD, MA, MT, NV, NH, PA, WA — but the canonical list is contested (some sources classify MI, OR, or NV differently). Verify the current rule for your jurisdiction; don't assert a fixed count. Under GDPR, recording is data processing — you need a basis and to inform attendees.
• A cloud AI notetaker grants a third party access to the conversation, which can waive privilege. Don't auto-record sensitive or privileged meetings (legal, HR, M&A, incident reviews).
• Redact names, secrets, and confidential details before distribution if the audience is wider than the room — and tighten distribution on anything sensitive.

Distribution

Ship within 24–48h while memory is fresh. (VoiceType / Wrike, accessed 2026-06-02.)

1. Draft — send the record as a draft, not a finalized minute.
2. Invite corrections — let attendees fix attribution and dates; this is your accuracy pass.
3. Finalize — lock it once corrections land, still inside 48h.

Then route, don't fork. Action items → a tracker via project-ops (or pushed by automation-flows / notion-connector). Durable decisions → decision-records. Keep one canonical home for the record and link to it — don't paste three diverging copies into Slack, Notion, and email.

Anti-patterns