Most meetings produce notes that nobody reads, nobody acts on, and nobody remembers. The meeting ends, the notes go into a shared drive, and six months later someone asks "did we ever decide that?" and nobody knows.
This is the hidden cost of bad meeting notes.
What Bad Notes Look Like
Bad notes try to capture everything. Every comment, every opinion, every tangent. They read like a transcript, not a record of decisions.
The result: no one can find anything. No one knows what was decided. No one knows what to do next.
What Good Notes Look Like
Good notes answer three questions:
- What did we decide?
- Who owns each action item?
- What are the next steps and deadlines?
That's it. Three things. Everything else is noise.
The Decision Log
The best teams keep a decision log — a running document of every decision made, the rationale behind it, and when it was made.
This solves the "wait, when did we decide that?" problem. You can look back and see exactly what was decided, by whom, and why.
It also prevents the meeting loop: the same decision being made in meeting after meeting because nobody remembers what was decided last time.
The 24-Hour Rule
Meeting notes that don't go out within 24 hours are effectively useless. The meeting is still fresh in everyone's mind, but once a week passes, context is lost.
Send notes the same day. Include the three answers: decision, owner, next steps.
Make Notes Actionable
The test of good meeting notes: if someone reads them a month later, do they know what to do?
If the notes say "discussed the roadmap" — that's bad.
If the notes say "decided to prioritize mobile app over web features in Q2. Jane owns mobile UX by April 30" — that's good.
The difference is specificity. Specific notes lead to specific actions. Vague notes lead to vague intentions that never happen.
Stop transcribing your meetings. Start documenting decisions.
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