Why most notes never get read again
Most notes end up as a chronological transcript. That version is obvious to people who were in the room and exhausting for people who were not, so nobody opens it again.
Notes have two readers: the colleague who missed the meeting, and you a month later. Neither cares what was said. Both care what was decided.
Decision, reason, action: three sections are enough
- Decisions: one line each. If something was discussed but postponed, record the postponement itself.
- Reasons: one or two lines on why. This is the section that stops the same debate from happening twice.
- Actions: only items with an owner and a date. Missing either one, it is a wish, not an action.
What a company got by banning slides
Amazon is the company that pushed meeting documents to the extreme. Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint in executive meetings in 2004, and in his 2017 shareholder letter he described what replaced it: narratively structured six-page memos, read in silence by everyone at the start of the meeting.
The point is not the six pages, it is the direction. Speech can stay vague and still sound convincing; written sentences cannot hide their gaps. Meeting notes work on the same principle: the moment you write a decision down, you can see what was never actually decided, and wherever the writing stalls is the agenda for the next meeting.
Keywords during the meeting, cleanup within ten minutes
Trying to write full sentences during the meeting makes you lose the conversation. Jot keywords and numbers, then move them into the three sections within ten minutes after the meeting while memory is fresh. Even one day later you are first reconstructing what each keyword meant, and the same cleanup balloons.
Different meetings, different records
The three sections are the base form. Which one carries the weight depends on the kind of meeting.
| Meeting type | What to record | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Decision meeting | The decision, the reason, even the objections | Recording the verdict but not the why |
| Recurring status meeting | Progress on old actions and the new ones | Rewriting the same agenda from scratch weekly |
| Brainstorm | Every idea raised and how to validate next | Keeping nothing because nothing was decided |
| One-on-one | What was agreed and asked of each other | Letting it drift into chat and skipping notes entirely |
Stop redrawing the skeleton
Recreating the decision, reason and action sections in a blank document every time is a cost too. Keep the skeleton as a template and just fill it in each meeting: the quality of the record improves before the writing time even drops.
Frequently asked questions
We record meetings and use AI summaries. Do we still need notes?
A recording keeps what was said; notes keep what was decided. Summary tools can propose candidate decisions and action items, but they do not take responsibility for which line was an actual decision and which was passing talk. Use the generated summary as a draft, but confirming the decisions, reasons and actions is a job for someone who was in the room.
Who should take the notes?
Someone other than the facilitator. Running the meeting and recording it at the same time blurs both jobs. In a team, rotate the role: the more people have taken notes, the more clearly everyone starts to speak in meetings, which is a nice side effect.
How detailed should the notes be?
Detailed enough that someone who missed the meeting can act without follow-up questions. The discussion can shrink to a line or two, but the decision itself, its reason, the owner and the date must not. In practice that rarely runs past one screen.