---
name: meeting-minutes
description: Use when asked to write meeting minutes — the after-the-fact record of what was discussed, decided, and assigned in a meeting — as distinct from a [[meeting-agenda]], which is the before-the-meeting plan rather than the after-the-meeting record.
---

# Meeting Minutes

Meeting minutes are the record written after a meeting of what was
decided, who owns what as a result, and anything explicitly deferred.
They exist so that people who were in the room don't have to rely on
memory, and people who weren't have a reliable account of what happened
— not a transcript of how the discussion unfolded.

## Meeting agenda vs. meeting minutes

An agenda and minutes are opposite ends of the same meeting: the
[[meeting-agenda]] is written before, stating what will be covered and
in what order; minutes are written after, recording what actually was
decided and assigned. A meeting can have a clean agenda and still
produce useless minutes, or vice versa — they're separate documents with
separate jobs, not two names for the same thing.

## Key components

- **Attendees** — who was actually present (and, where it matters, who
  was invited but absent), so later readers know whose input shaped the
  decisions.
- **Decisions made** — each decision stated plainly, with enough of the
  reasoning behind it that a later reader can tell why, not just what
  was chosen.
- **Action items** — each one with a named owner and a due date; an
  action item with neither is a wish, not a commitment.
- **Deferred or parked items** — anything raised but explicitly not
  decided, so it isn't forgotten and isn't mistaken for something that
  was resolved.

## What to leave out

Minutes record outcomes, not the conversation that produced them. A
blow-by-blow account of who said what, in what order, takes longer to
write, takes longer to read, and buries the two things that actually
matter — decisions and actions — under detail nobody will act on later.
If a specific piece of reasoning matters for a decision, capture that
reasoning in a sentence next to the decision, not as a transcript of the
debate that led to it.

## Tracking action items past the meeting

Minutes capture action items at the moment they're assigned, but the
meeting itself isn't where they get tracked to completion. Feed them
into a running tracker — see [[risks-actions-issues-decisions]] — so an
action item doesn't quietly disappear once the minutes are filed and
nobody revisits them until the next meeting, if then.

## Sending them out

Minutes are most useful sent out soon after the meeting, while the
reasoning behind each decision is still fresh for anyone who needs to
question or build on it. The longer they wait, the more likely a
decision gets misremembered or an action item's owner forgets they
agreed to it.

## Common pitfalls

- **Action items with no owner or due date** — nothing about "we should
  look into X" actually happens; it needs a named person and a date.
- **Minutes sent out days later** — by the time they land, attendees'
  memory of the decision and its reasoning has already faded, and
  disagreements about what was actually decided start to surface.
- **Decisions recorded without reasoning** — "decided to use vendor A"
  with no context leaves a later reader unable to tell whether
  circumstances have changed enough to revisit it.
- **Verbatim transcript instead of a record of outcomes** — over-detailed
  minutes take longer to produce and are harder for anyone to act on
  than a short, decision-focused summary.
- **No distinction between decided and deferred** — a topic that was
  raised but not resolved, if not marked as deferred, quietly gets
  treated as settled.
- **Minutes never fed into a tracker** — action items live only in the
  minutes document and get rediscovered, if at all, at the next meeting.

## Learn more

- [[meeting-agenda]] for the before-the-meeting counterpart to this
  after-the-meeting record.
- [[risks-actions-issues-decisions]] for tracking action items and
  decisions to closure once the meeting is over.
- [[one-on-one-meeting]] and [[all-hands-meeting]] for meeting formats
  that typically produce minutes of their own.