Sample guide: how to take useful meeting notes
Sample article for the Sandbox Notes site: a simple structure for meeting notes, agenda, decisions and action items, that a team can find later.
This is sample content for the Sandbox Notes test site. It exists to exercise the article layout, the byline, the disclosure note, sources and translations.
The short answer
Useful meeting notes answer three questions a week later: what did we talk about, what did we decide, and who does what by when. Everything else is optional.
A structure that works
- Agenda. Write the topics before the meeting, so people can prepare and add their own.
- Decisions. One line per decision, written as a sentence anyone could understand without having been there: “We ship the beta to 50 teams on November 3.”
- Action items. A task, one owner and a due date. A task with two owners usually has none.
Habits that help
- Take notes in a shared place during the meeting, not in a private document you clean up later.
- Read the decisions aloud at the end. Corrections are cheap while everyone is still in the room.
- Keep every meeting of a series in one notebook, so the history is in one place.
Try it
The meeting notes use case shows this structure in a weekly team meeting, and the reading time calculator tells you how long your notes take to read.