A good meeting ends with decisions and next steps. A week later, half of them are forgotten, and nobody can remember why a choice was made.
Why notes fail
Someone has to take them, which means someone is half in the meeting. The notes live in a doc nobody opens again. And action items stay as text instead of becoming tasks with owners and dates.
What to capture
- Decisions, with the reason. “Apple Pay moves out of the first release, because it is the riskiest part.”
- Action items, with an owner and a date. “Webhook retries, Dev, by Thursday.”
- The source: the moment in the meeting where each was said.
Link everything to the moment
The single most useful habit is to link each decision and action back to the point in the conversation where it happened. Months later, “why did we drop Apple Pay?” has an answer you can check.
Turn actions into proposals, not tickets
Automatically creating tickets from a transcript sounds efficient, but it fills the backlog with half-right tasks. A better pattern is to turn each action into a proposal: a suggested task with its owner, date, and source, that someone approves.
Keep a decision log
Decisions deserve their own searchable list, separate from tasks. It becomes the project's memory.
A simple meeting routine
- Record the meeting, with everyone's consent.
- Afterwards, extract decisions and action items with owners and dates.
- Review the list in a minute or two; approve, edit, or drop each item.
- Approved actions become tasks; approved decisions go to the decision log.
Common mistakes
- Action items without owners. “We should look into it” is not an action. Give it a name and a date, or drop it.
- Decisions without reasons. The reason is what makes a decision useful months later.
- Recording without consent. Always tell people a meeting is recorded, and set how long recordings are kept.
Keel does this from a recording or transcript: decisions and actions arrive as proposals, each linked to its moment. See meetings and decisions.
