How to write meeting minutes

Whether you are just starting into your professional career or you are an experienced senior employee at your company, writing meeting minutes is part of your daily life. It's an important part of every meeting. It can help to keep everyone on track, ensure that decisions made are followed up on, and can be used as “evidence” in case of disagreement. But a meeting minutes can not only be helpful for the attendees, but also to anyone who was unable to attend the meeting. The only problem is, it can be challenging at time to keep track of what is being discussed and focus on the discussion yourself.

By following these tips below, you'll be able to take better meeting minutes that will help you and your business run more smoothly.

How to take accurate and concise meeting notes

One of the most essential skills in business is taking accurate and concise meeting notes during meetings. Yet, many people struggle with this task. One of the main reasons for this is that they try to capture everything that is said word by word.

This is not only time intensive, but also often results in missing the actual key points that matter. A better approach is to focus on catching the main ideas and action items.

Start by noting down a brief summary of the meeting's purpose. This will help you later to focus on capturing what is most relevant to the meeting. As the conversation starts, make notes of any key points or ideas that seam relevant to the main topic. This includes action item that are assigned to specific people. Capturing the name, the task and the due date is most important.

At the end of the meeting, take a few minutes to review your meeting notes and add any thoughts or clarifications. This will help you later to refer back to what was being discussed, without having to worry about deciphering your cryptic notes.

Formatting and organising your meeting notes

There are many different ways to format and organize your minutes. The most important thing is to make sure that the meeting minutes are clear and easy to read. This not only counts for handwritten notes, but also for typed ones. Making sure you or someone else will be able to understand those notes in hindsight is crucial. Here are a few tips to help you get started:

1. Make sure to include the meeting date, meeting time, and if necessary the location of the meeting.

2. Create a list of all the attendees, as well as any other relevant information (such as titles or roles).

3. Structure your meeting notes in a way that the course of the meeting is clear and understandable.

4. If there were any decisions made during the meeting, be sure to include these in the minutes.

5. Finally, add a list of any action items that were assigned to you or others during the meeting.

‍

By following these simple tips, you can ensure that your minutes are well organized and easy to read.

Approving, distributing and archiving your minutes

The meeting notes of a meeting are the only written record of what was discussed and what decisions were made. Therefore, they can serve as a single source of truth. Therefore, it should be easy for others to access and understand previous meeting minutes.

Once the meeting has been finished, they should be distributed to all attendees of the meeting, as well as any other interested parties. If approved by the other attendees, they should also be archived in a central location that everyone has access to (usury on a drive, in the CRM or any other kind of knowledge hub).

Approving, distributing, and archiving minutes helps to ensure that everyone is aware of the decisions that have been made and can refer back to them if necessary. It also provides a valuable written record that can be consulted in the future.

All in all, meeting minutes are an accurate and concise record of a meeting that allows everyone involved to stay on track and be held accountable. They should be structured in a way that is easy to read, understand, and should be approved, distributed, and archived accordingly, so everyone can refer back to them if needed.

Let your personal meeting assistant, jamie take notes for you

In the end writing meeting minutes can be quite time-consuming and most of us don't like it or don't have the time to review those meeting notes. This leads to unstructured records and loss of accountability.

We often struggle with writing down what is being said while trying to contribute to the meeting. It feels almost frustrating to tying to capture everything that is important, hence only a few of us are efficient in taking brief and concise notes without missing some of the important stuff.

If you're looking for a more efficient way to take care of this time-consuming task, jamie – your personal AI assistant – can generate your future meeting minutes for you. Its AI algorithms capture everything that is important during the meeting and summaries it within seconds. Click here to find out more and try jamie for free.