Meeting notes
Turns a recorded call into a written record with the decisions, the open questions, and the owners.
Tools
Otter.ai, Fathom, Notion, Slack, Google Calendar
Outcomes
Notes posted within an hour of the call • Decisions separated from discussion • Every action has a named owner • Recordings searchable by topic
Documentation
Instruction-ready detail below
A meeting is agreed, everyone leaves, and the write-up is evening work that usually does not happen. The recording is the only record left, and it is the worst kind: forty minutes to find one sentence. It runs while the details are still recoverable. The transcript becomes three short blocks within the hour. Decisions are separated from discussion, and each decision says what was agreed, who agreed to it, and what would make it change. Open questions are listed with the person who has to answer them, because those are the sentences people search for a month later. Actions are pulled out into a list with one owner and one date each, and posted in the meeting's channel so nobody goes looking for the recording. The notes page is filed under the project rather than the calendar invite, and the same headings are used every week. Anything the transcript is unsure about is marked uncertain instead of smoothed over. A person still decides whether a discussion counted as a decision, checks the summary before it is treated as the record, and owns the wording sent to people who were not in the room.