The Definitive Guide to Meeting Minutes

Meeting minutes are the record that makes a meeting matter after everyone leaves the room. Good minutes remind attendees of the important highlights, key decisions, and action items, bring anyone who couldn’t attend up to speed, and create the accountability that keeps commitments from slipping through the cracks.

Sometimes we take for granted that writing them well isn’t easy. Sure, anyone can create a set of “minutes,” but there’s a lot that separates the good from the bad, which is a big reason we built the Meeting Template Generator.

This is a complete guide to writing great meeting minutes, even (gasp!) without a tool like LessMeeting. We’ll start with what to include, then cover the three factors that separate forgettable notes from ones people act on: Format, Note Types, and Collaboration.

What to include in your meeting minutes

Formats vary from company to company, but nearly every good set of minutes captures the same items, grouped by when you handle them:

Before the meeting

• Date, time, and location
• Attendees, plus anyone invited who couldn’t attend (names and email addresses)
• The accepted agenda
• The meeting objective

During the meeting

• Action items assigned
• Key decisions and their outcomes
• Any KPIs or metrics reviewed
• Next steps
• The date/time of the next meeting

After the meeting

• Make sure action items and decisions are clearly called out
• Agree as a team how quickly minutes should go out (ASAP is best)
• Agree on how they’ll be sent (email, LessMeeting, a shared doc, etc.) so it’s consistent every time

Format

What good are meeting minutes if no one can read them? This may seem like a ‘fluff’ item but is one of the things that will really make your minutes stand out. People will see your notes and take notice!

• Find a template & standardize it across your teams. You do this for a number of documents already and minutes should be one of them.
  • Sections to include: Date & Time, Location, Attendees & Roles, Agenda, Notes, Actions, Parking Lot
• Don’t write novels. Use bullets to capture key ideas & details. This lets you spend the meeting participating instead of furiously writing notes.
  • Bonus points – Use sub-bullets to give the notes a hierarchy that makes them more readable
• Clearly call out important items.
  • Mark actions with an “@” followed by the owner & date due
  • Bold or highlight decisions

Note Types

There are only 3 types of notes you need to take to keep your minutes simple but also useful.

1. Key Points - These are the regular notes you’ll take. I say “key” points to highlight the fact that you shouldn’t write every word down. Capture the main idea and then rejoin the discussion.
2. Decisions - These are important! Highlight them so they’re easy to find.
3. Action Items (@) - Capture all todos including the task, the owner, who the todo is owed to, and the due date.

Collaboration

One of my pet peeves is when I notice half the room taking notes in a meeting, but no one sharing their notes afterward. While I’m happy that people are taking notes in the first place (baby steps!), great notes come out of collaboration. Use the wisdom of the crowd!

• While pencil & pen is always a great tool, take advantage of collaboration software to simultaneously take notes with other attendees (think Google Docs style).
  • Shameless plug: LessMeeting makes this incredibly easy!
• Designate someone to combine everyone’s notes into a single doc.
• Send out meeting minutes to all attendees (even those who did NOT attend!) immediately after the meeting.

Write minutes people will actually read

The best meeting minutes are the ones that get read. You can’t guarantee it, but you can stack the odds in your favor:

• Keep them brief. Less information that gets read beats a wall of text no one opens.
• Make them legible. Clean formatting is what makes notes stand out.
• Be objective. Capture what happened, not your commentary on it.
• Cut the fluff. That usually means fewer adjectives.
• Send them ASAP. The longer you wait, the less likely people are to read them, and the less time they have to act on tasks before the next meeting.

Summary

So to recap:

1. Capture the essentials: before, during, and after the meeting
2. Use a standardized, readable template
3. Take the right kinds of notes: key points, decisions, and action items
4. Take minutes as a team and send them out fast

Step 4 is where most minutes die, so it’s worth a template of its own: here’s the recap email to send within 24 hours, along with five ways to chase an action item that’s already late.

How do you take your minutes? When you’re ready to make it easier, register for a free LessMeeting trial to help you take great meeting minutes.