The worst meeting notes are the most complete ones. A transcript captures everything and tells you nothing — three weeks later, nobody rereads eight paragraphs to find the one decision inside. Good meeting notes are ruthless: they keep the three things a meeting actually produces and drop the rest.
Capture only three things
- Decisions — what we chose, and why. The "why" is the part everyone forgets and re-litigates a month later.
- Actions — who does what by when. An action without an owner is a wish.
- Open questions — what was raised but not settled. These are next meeting's agenda, pre-written.
Everything else — the discussion, the detours — either fed one of those three or didn't matter. If a stray insight comes up mid-meeting, capture it as its own quick note rather than burying it in the minutes (one tap, then back to listening).
During: stay in the conversation
Notes lose to attention. Write in fragments, in your own words, and never mid-sentence-someone-else-is-saying. A simple running format works:
DECIDED: ship pricing page Friday — legal reviewed
ACTION: Sara → new App Store screenshots, Thu
OPEN: do we grandfather old trial users?
After: the two-minute ritual that does all the work
Here's the step that separates useful notes from archives: within an hour, spend two minutes tidying the fragments while the context is still alive. Memory fades fastest in the first hours — the same scribbles that are obvious at 2pm are hieroglyphics on Friday. Send actions to owners, file the note (loosely — one notebook per team or project is plenty), done.
Two minutes, once — versus twenty minutes of archaeology every time someone asks "what did we decide?" That question, by the way, is the real test of your system: you should be able to answer it in seconds, ideally by just asking your notes. It's the moment we built Clair Mind around — especially for people who live in meetings and managers tracking a dozen threads.