Notes, meetings and actions

You leave a meeting with three pages of half-sentences. A week later nobody can remember who agreed to do what, and the notes do not say.

This is a genuinely good use of an assistant, because the raw material is already yours and you can check the output instantly — L1’s test, satisfied. There is one specific way it goes wrong, and it is worth the whole lesson.

Ask before you record

Before any of this: if you are recording or transcribing a meeting, everyone present needs to know and agree. In many jurisdictions that is not a courtesy but a legal requirement, and it applies to the quiet automatic transcription your conferencing tool offers as much as to a phone on the table.

Ask at the start. It takes five seconds and there is no version of this where finding out afterwards goes well.

Notes in, structure out

The useful instruction separates three different kinds of thing that messy notes mix together:

These are my raw notes from a meeting. Produce:

DECISIONS — what was actually settled. Only include something if the notes show agreement. ACTIONS — one line each: owner — action — deadline. OPEN — anything discussed but not resolved. UNCLEAR — anything where you cannot tell whether it was decided, or who owns it. Quote the note you are unsure about.

Do not invent owners or deadlines. If the notes do not say, put it in UNCLEAR.

That final instruction is the one that makes this work.

The tidy summary problem

Left alone, a summariser resolves ambiguity. It is not being careless — it is producing readable prose, and readable prose does not say “somebody might do this, unclear who”.

So a genuinely unresolved discussion arrives as “The team agreed to review the pricing in Q3”, and now there is a written record of a decision that was never made. Six weeks later that sentence is the authority, and the person it implicitly assigned has no idea.

This is worse than messy notes, because messy notes are visibly messy. A clean document implies a clarity the meeting did not have.

Hence the UNCLEAR section. You are asking the assistant to preserve the ambiguity rather than smooth it, and to show you the note it could not read. Those items are your follow-up list, and they are the most valuable output.

Actions need a person

An action without an owner is a wish. “We should update the docs” appears in every set of notes ever taken and is never done.

Insist on the owner — action — deadline shape, and let anything missing a part fall into UNCLEAR rather than being quietly completed. Then, before circulating, do the one thing the assistant cannot: check that each named owner actually agreed. Being assigned a task by somebody else’s meeting notes is a small daily indignity of working life, and you can avoid inflicting it.

Try it now (6 minutes)

Take your most recent messy notes and run the structure above.

Look only at UNCLEAR and OPEN. Those are the questions to ask before you circulate anything. If UNCLEAR came back empty on genuinely messy notes, be suspicious — the ambiguity did not vanish, it got resolved for you.

Check your understanding

1. The most valuable section of a structured meeting summary is usually: The decisions list The unclear and unresolved items The attendee list

2. Why can a tidy summary be worse than messy notes? It is longer Its cleanliness implies an agreement the meeting did not reach It omits the date

3. Before transcribing a meeting you should: Check that everyone present knows and agrees Nothing — transcription is a normal tool feature Tell them afterwards when you circulate the notes

Recap

Get consent before recording. Ask for decisions, actions, open items and an explicit unclear list, forbid invented owners and deadlines, and treat the unclear section as the real output. An action without a person is a wish, and a summary that tidies away disagreement has recorded a decision nobody made.