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

If the ask is…	Route to
The durable decision record — full rationale, alternatives weighed, reversibility argued, review cadence	decision-records. This skill captures a decision in its meeting context and hands the heavy ADR off; it does not maintain the long-lived artifact
A reusable step-by-step procedure / runbook	sop-builder. A SOP is a repeatable how-to; meeting notes are a point-in-time record
Tracking the emitted tasks across a board / sprint	project-ops. This skill emits action items; their lifecycle is not its job
Scheduling the meeting, finding a slot, sending the invite	calendar-scheduling
Building the integration that pushes notes into Notion/Slack/a tracker	notion-connector / automation-flows
Summarizing an arbitrary document that is not a meeting	document-processing

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:

You have…	First move	Why
A live meeting / you're the note-taker	Capture in real time, then verbal-confirm each owner before close	Memory decays fast; the room is the cheapest place to fix attribution
An AI-notetaker transcript (Otter, Fireflies, Granola…)	Verify first — speakers, hallucinated tasks, quotes vs. source — before you trust any line	AI drafts misattribute speakers and invent tasks; a clean-looking draft is the trap
Raw bullet notes someone typed	Sort signal from noise, then chase the gaps (missing owners/dates)	The notes already filtered; your job is structure + completeness

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:

Bad	Good
"Look into the API stuff — team — soon"	"Spike the Stripe webhook retry path — María — by Tue Jun 9"
"Follow up on the contract"	"Send the signed vendor contract to legal — Marc — by Thu Jun 11"
"Everyone review the doc"	"Leave inline comments on the launch doc — Ana, Júlia — by Mon Jun 8"

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:

Bad	Good
"Decided to use Postgres."	"Adopt Postgres over DynamoDB for the events store. Why: relational queries we need; team already knows it. Reversibility: partially-reversible. Dissent: none."

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

Anti-pattern	Why it fails	Do instead
Paste the whole transcript as "the notes"	Nobody re-reads a wall of dialogue; the decisions drown	Curate to decisions, actions, open questions + a TL;DR
Action item with no owner ("the team will…")	Shared ownership = nobody owns it; it dies	One named person per task
Owner but no real date ("soon", "next week")	Not a deadline; can't be tracked or chased	verb, owner, by <real date>
Ship the AI draft unverified	Hallucinated tasks and swapped speakers go out as fact	Run the 3 verification checks first
Auto-record a sensitive/privileged meeting	Consent and privilege exposure; can waive privilege	Announce + consent; hand-note sensitive meetings
Decision with no why	Rots — re-litigated when nobody recalls the trade-off	One sentence of rationale per decision
Send the recap a week later	Memory's gone; corrections are guesses; team already drifted	Draft within 24–48h, invite corrections, finalize
Fork the notes into three places	Versions diverge; people act on the stale one	One canonical home, link don't copy
Invent a missing owner or date	A fabricated commitment is worse than a flagged gap	Flag it as "needs confirmation" — never guess
Bolt RACI onto a standup	Overhead nobody reads; slows a simple sync	RACI only when ownership is genuinely contested