How do I turn meeting notes into decisions and action items?

Meeting notes pile up and nobody reads them. What people need afterwards is three things: what was decided, who does what by when, and what is still open. The notes bury all three in the order things were said.

Sorting them by hand takes ten minutes you do not have. An assistant can do the first pass in seconds. The risk is that it tidies the notes into something more decisive than the meeting was. A proposal becomes a decision. "Someone should look at this" becomes an action with a name on it. The prompt below is written to prevent that.

What you need

• The notes, minutes or a transcript, as text.
• The meeting date, if you want "next week" turned into a date. Without it, relative dates stay as they were written.

The prompt

Paste this into a new chat, then paste your notes under it.

You are writing up one meeting from the notes pasted below. Work only from those notes. Never invent a decision, an owner or a date.

Sort every relevant statement into one bucket:
1. Decision: the notes show the group agreed or approved something. A proposal that was only discussed is not a decision.
2. Action: a named person took on a task. Use the owner exactly as named. If no one owns it, write [CONFIRM: owner].
3. Open question: raised and not settled.
4. FYI: background with no follow-up (at most 5 bullets).

Give each decision and action a short word-for-word quote from the notes. Put due dates exactly as the notes state them, or [CONFIRM: due date]. Finish with a list of what the notes do not say.

NOTES:
[paste here]

How to check the result

Take the decisions first. For each one, find the quote in your notes. If the quote shows people discussing rather than agreeing, move it to open questions. This is the most common mistake, and it is worth five minutes.

Then the actions. Look at every owner. If a name appears that was not attached to that task in the notes, take it out. An action assigned by a summary, not by the person who agreed to it, tends to be ignored.

Fill in the [CONFIRM: ...] gaps by asking the people in the meeting. A short message with the list of gaps usually gets answers within the hour.

Send the cleaned list to the attendees the same day. Notes that arrive a week later are rarely read.

What good output looks like

This is an invented illustration of the shape, not a real meeting. A decision line reads: "Launch moves to the second week of the month. Quote: 'OK, second week it is.'" An action line reads: "Owner: Priya. Action: send the revised plan to the client. Due: [CONFIRM: due date]." An open question reads: "Who pays for the extra licences? Raised, not settled."

Notice what is missing. There is no summary paragraph, no praise for the discussion and no owner for the thing nobody volunteered for. If the output has any of those, the prompt has drifted. Paste your notes again and say "stricter, only what the notes support".

If your meetings are long, run the prompt on one agenda item at a time. Short inputs give better quotes, and you can see where each decision came from.

Limits

• It only knows what the notes say. If the notes miss the moment of agreement, the decision will not appear, and that is correct behaviour.
• It cannot tell who was in the room unless the notes say.
• A transcript with no speaker labels gives weak owners. Add names where you can.
• It does not send the summary or create tasks in your tracker.

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