Meeting Notes

Meeting Notes

Purpose

Turn a meeting into a record of what was decided and what happens next. A transcript is not notes; nobody reads a transcript, and the value of a meeting evaporates within a week without a record of its decisions.

When to Use

• Summarizing a meeting or a call.
• Processing a transcript or a recording.
• Producing a record of decisions for people who were not there.
• Extracting action items.

Capabilities

• Extracting decisions, actions, and open questions.
• Distinguishing what was decided from what was discussed.
• Attribution and ownership.
• Structuring notes for a reader who was absent.

Inputs

• The transcript, recording, or your own notes.
• The attendees and their roles.
• What the meeting was for.

Outputs

• Decisions, stated with the reasoning.
• Actions with an owner and a date.
• Open questions with an owner.
• Enough context that someone absent can follow.

Workflow

1. Extract the decisions first — What was actually decided? Not discussed, not raised, not considered — decided. This is what the meeting produced.
2. Extract the actions, with an owner and a date — An action with no owner will not be done. An action with no date will be done eventually, which means never.
3. Record the open questions — What was raised and not resolved? These are what the next meeting is for, and they are routinely lost.
4. Capture the reasoning behind each decision — Not the whole debate. Why this option, and what was rejected. In six months, the reasoning is the part people need.
5. Write for someone who was not there — They have no context. A note that says "agreed to go with Sam's approach" is useless to them and, in two months, to you.
6. Send it the same day — Notes sent a week later are archaeology.

Best Practices

• The single most valuable thing in meeting notes is the list of decisions with their reasoning. Everything else is optional.
• An action item without an owner is a wish. Name a person, never a team.
• Do not transcribe the discussion. Nobody reads it, and it obscures the three sentences that matter.
• Record what was rejected and why. It stops the same option being re-proposed at the next meeting.
• If nothing was decided, say so plainly. A meeting that produced no decision is worth knowing about.
• Circulate the notes and invite corrections. The record everyone has seen and not disputed is a stronger record than the one you wrote alone.

Examples

Notes that are useful in six months:

# Platform sync — 2026-07-14

Present: Maya (chair), Sam, Aisha, Tom. Apologies: Jo.

## Decisions

**1. We will use PostgreSQL advisory locks for job deduplication, not Redis.**
Rejected Redis because it adds an operational dependency for a problem that
occurs once per night, and we have no Redis in production today. Rejected
"designate one instance" because it is a single point of failure.
Revisit if we ever need job scheduling without a database.

**2. The integration test gate ships Monday 21 July, not this Friday.**
Aisha raised that three teams still use `deploy --force` in their scripts.
Shipping Friday would break their deploys with no notice. One week's notice,
with an announcement going out today.

**3. We are NOT migrating to a new CI provider this quarter.**
Discussed at length. The cost is 3-4 weeks and the benefit is ~6 minutes per
pipeline run. Not worth it now; revisit if pipeline time exceeds 20 minutes.

## Actions

| Action                                                | Owner | Due     |
|-------------------------------------------------------|-------|---------|
| Announce the deploy gate change in #engineering        | Maya  | 14 Jul  |
| Implement advisory-lock deduplication                  | Sam   | 18 Jul  |
| Audit and remove `deploy --force` from the 3 repos     | Aisha | 18 Jul  |
| Write the ADR for the locking decision                 | Sam   | 21 Jul  |

## Open

- **Do we need job scheduling in the workers, or only in the API?** Tom raised
  this; not resolved. Tom to bring a proposal to the next sync.
- Jo was absent and owns the CI budget. Decision 3 assumes no budget pressure
  to move — Maya to confirm with Jo before Friday.

Someone who was not in the room can read this in ninety seconds and know exactly what happened, what they owe, and what is still open.

Notes

• Recording what was rejected, and why, prevents the single most wasteful pattern in organizational life: re-litigating a settled decision because nobody wrote down why it was settled.
• The "open" section is what makes the next meeting productive. Without it, the next meeting rediscovers the same unresolved questions.
• Notes with an owner and a date on every action have a completion rate several times higher than notes with neither. This is not a subtle effect.