Meeting Notes to Action Items

In short Pulling actions out of meeting notes means finding three things and ignoring everything else: what was decided, what someone agreed to do, and what was deferred. An action needs an owner and a date, and an action with neither is a wish — "we should look into that" belongs in the deferred list rather than the action list, because pretending it is an action is how action lists lose their credibility. Notes will not always contain owners and dates, and where they do not the honest output is to say so rather than to invent one. A list of actions with three named owners and two blanks is genuinely more useful than five confident assignments, two of which nobody agreed to, because the blanks are the follow-up questions. Distinguish a decision from a discussion as well. "We talked about moving the launch" is not a decision; "launch moves to March, Priya to update the plan by Friday" is. Circulating the actions the same day, with the blanks visible, is what turns a meeting into work.