Meeting Minutes Formatter

In short Good minutes record three things and deliberately not a fourth. Decisions, in the form of what was decided rather than the discussion that led there. Action items with a named owner and a date — an action with no owner is not an action, and "the team will" means nobody. And anything explicitly deferred, so it does not silently vanish. The fourth thing, a transcript of who said what, is what makes minutes go unread; nobody rereads the argument, and writing it down changes how people speak in the meeting. Write them the same day. Notes taken in a meeting are comprehensible for a few hours and cryptic by the next morning, and the value of minutes lies almost entirely in the action list, which is only useful if it goes out before people have moved on. Send them to everyone who attended and everyone affected, and make the actions the first thing in the message rather than the last, since that is the part people need to see.