# Meeting Action Items

> Turn raw meeting notes, transcripts, or voice-memo dumps into structured decisions, action items (with owner + due date), and open questions — ready to paste into Slack, email, or a tracker. Use whenever the user pastes meeting notes/transcripts, says "extract action items from this", "summarize this call", "who owns what from this meeting", or uploads a transcript file and wants next steps rather than a narrative recap. Trigger proactively any time raw unstructured meeting text appears in the conversation, even if the user's ask is vague ("here's the notes from today").

- Skill: `zeiynz/meeting-action-items` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 2 files)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add zeiynz/meeting-action-items`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/zeiynz/meeting-action-items/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Research & Search
- Author: zeiynz (https://skillmd.com/u/zeiynz)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/zeiynz/meeting-action-items

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# Meeting Action Items

Converts messy, real-world meeting input (half-sentences, crosstalk, someone saying "yeah let's do that" three different ways) into three clean buckets: **decisions made, actions owed, and things still open.** The goal is a summary someone could act on without having attended the meeting.

## Why not just "summarize this meeting"

A narrative summary optimizes for understanding what happened. This skill optimizes for **what happens next** — a different, more useful artifact for most post-meeting workflows (standups, sales calls, project syncs, 1:1s).

## Workflow

### Step 1: Identify meeting type — it changes what to extract
- **Standup/status sync** → focus on blockers and today/tomorrow commitments
- **Sales/customer call** → focus on objections raised, next steps, and follow-up commitments made to the prospect
- **Project/planning meeting** → focus on decisions + owners + dates
- **1:1** → focus on commitments made by each party, don't over-formalize (a 1:1 doesn't need a project-tracker-style output)

### Step 2: Extract into three buckets (never merge these)

**Decisions made** — things the group actually agreed on, stated definitively. Distinguish from *discussed but not decided* — if the transcript shows genuine ambiguity or disagreement, put it in Open Questions instead, don't force a decision that wasn't made.

**Action items** — format as: `[Owner] — [specific action] — [due date if stated, else "no date given — flag"]`. If a speaker isn't named in the transcript (common in auto-transcribed audio, e.g. "Speaker 2"), don't guess who they are — mark owner as "unclear — confirm" rather than inventing a name.

**Open questions / unresolved** — anything raised but not settled. This bucket is often the most valuable one and the most commonly dropped by narrative summaries.

### Step 3: Flag risks explicitly
Call out anything that sounds like: a missed deadline being discussed, a disagreement that got glossed over rather than resolved, or a commitment made without clear ownership. These are the things that cause the *next* meeting to be "wait, who was doing this?"

### Step 4: Format for the destination
Ask (or infer from context) where this is going:
- **Slack/email recap** → short, scannable, bullets only, no headers needed for a short meeting
- **Tracker/ticket creation** → one line per action item in a format ready to paste into Jira/Linear/Asana (title + owner + due date as separate fields)
- **Formal minutes** → use the full template in `references/minutes-template.md`

## Common pitfalls
- Don't invent due dates that weren't stated — "no date given" is more useful than a fabricated deadline
- Don't attribute a decision to "the team" when only one or two people actually agreed and others were silent — silence isn't consent, note it as tentative
- Multi-speaker transcripts with unclear attribution: preserve the ambiguity rather than resolving it via guesswork

## Reference
- `references/minutes-template.md` — full formal-minutes format for board/leadership meetings