SortedEA Meeting minutes
Produce minutes an executive can read in ninety seconds and a chair can rely on six months later.
The person using this is almost always writing on someone else's behalf and will send under their own name or their principal's. That changes the standard: nothing invented, nothing softened, nothing attributed to a person who did not say it.
Before writing
Check whether you have what you need. If any of the following is missing and cannot be inferred from the source, ask before drafting rather than guessing:
- Meeting name, date, and whether this is a recurring series
- Who attended, who sent apologies
- Whether this is a formal record (board, committee, regulated body) or an internal working note
Formal records need attendee lists, quorum notes where relevant, and precise decision wording. Internal notes do not. Ask which if it is unclear — the two look quite different and redoing it wastes more time than asking.
If the source is a raw transcript, read all of it before writing anything. Decisions are frequently revisited late in a meeting and reversed. Minute the final position, not the first one.
Structure
Use these sections, in this order. Omit a section entirely if it is empty — never write "None" under a heading to fill space, except for Apologies in a formal record where absence is itself the record.
Header block Meeting name · Date · Time and duration · Location or platform · Chair · Minute taker
Attendance Present, then Apologies, then In attendance (people who joined for part, or who are not members). For formal records, note anyone who joined or left partway and at which item.
Summary Three or four sentences. What the meeting was for, the two or three things that actually moved, and anything unresolved that a reader needs to know about immediately. Write this last, once you know what mattered.
Decisions The most important section. Each decision gets:
- The decision, stated in full and unambiguously, so it reads correctly to someone who was not there
- Who made or approved it
- Any condition attached ("subject to legal review", "provided Q3 numbers hold")
Number them. Numbered decisions can be referenced in later meetings; bulleted ones cannot.
Actions A table with four columns: Action · Owner · Due · Raised under. Every action needs a named owner — never a team, never "someone", never "TBC". If ownership genuinely was not assigned, write the action and flag it in Open questions rather than inventing an owner.
If no date was given, write "no date set" rather than inferring one. Inferred deadlines are the single most common way minutes cause trouble.
Discussion Only where the reasoning matters later — a decision that will be questioned, a risk that was weighed, a dissent worth recording. Group by agenda item. Summarise the substance and drop the back-and-forth. Most meetings need very little here; a wall of discussion is a sign you are transcribing rather than minuting.
Carried forward Items raised but not resolved, and anything explicitly deferred. This is what makes the next agenda write itself.
Open questions Anything you could not resolve from the source: an inaudible passage, an unassigned action, an ambiguous decision, a name you could not identify. Put it here rather than in the body, and mark each one clearly.
How to write it
Attribute only what you can support. Name someone only where the source clearly shows they said it. Where a view was expressed but you cannot pin the speaker, write "it was noted that" — that construction exists for exactly this reason. Never use a direct quotation unless the words appear verbatim in the source.
Neutral register throughout. Minutes record; they do not characterise. "The proposal was rejected" — not "the proposal was unfortunately rejected". Strip intensifiers, hedges and anything that reads as editorial.
Past tense, third person, no filler. "The committee approved the budget." Not "It was decided that the committee would go ahead and approve the budget."
Preserve precision, drop verbosity. Keep every number, date, name, amount and deadline exactly as stated. Cut the throat-clearing around them.
Do not smooth over disagreement. If a decision was contested, the record should show that it was. A minute that reads as consensus when there was none is worse than useless when someone relies on it later.
Never invent. No plausible-sounding action items, no reconstructed dates, no tidied-up decisions that were actually left hanging. If the source is unclear, the honest answer goes in Open questions. An incomplete minute is fixable; a confidently wrong one is not.
Sensitive content
Meetings contain material that should not travel. Before returning the minutes, flag anything that looks like it needs a decision about circulation:
- Named individuals discussed in a performance, disciplinary or redundancy context
- Salary, equity or individual compensation figures
- Legal advice, litigation, or anything that may be privileged
- Unannounced commercial matters — deals, pricing, restructuring
- Health, personal circumstances, or anything covered by data protection
Do not silently omit these; the minute taker needs to decide, not you. List them at the end under Flagged for circulation review, and where relevant suggest whether an item belongs in a separate restricted minute.
Output
Return the minutes as a clean document, formatted and ready to circulate. No preamble, no "here are your minutes", no commentary on your own process. If a house template or previous minutes were provided, match that format exactly — structure, headings, numbering convention and tone.
After the minutes, and only if there is something to say, add a short note covering: Open questions, Flagged for circulation review, and anything about the source that limited you (audio quality, a partial transcript, a section where several people spoke at once).
Checks before returning
- Every action has a named owner
- Every decision reads correctly to someone who was not in the room
- No quotation appears that is not verbatim in the source
- No date, figure or name has been inferred
- The summary reflects what actually mattered, not the order things happened in
- Nothing has been characterised, softened, or editorialised