Build a Meeting Notes System
Turn rambling notes into decisions, owners and deadlines — in a format consistent enough that you can search it six months later. The value is in the structure, not the summary.
Why this one
A summary of a meeting is close to useless a week later. What you need is: what was decided, who owes what, by when, and what was explicitly left open. Those four things fit a fixed template, and a fixed template is what makes six months of notes searchable.
Steps
Define the output format first
Decide the exact structure before you process a single meeting: Decisions, Actions (owner + deadline), Open questions, Context worth keeping. Fixed structure is what turns notes into something you can scan, and changing it later means your archive is inconsistent forever.
Write the extraction prompt
The instruction to mark unstated owners rather than guess them is the important one. A guessed owner is worse than a blank, because nobody argues with it.
PromptExtract the following from these meeting notes. Use exactly these four headings and nothing else. DECISIONS — what was actually decided, one line each ACTIONS — owner, task, deadline. If an owner or deadline was not stated, write UNASSIGNED or NO DEADLINE. Never guess. OPEN QUESTIONS — raised and not resolved CONTEXT — anything a person joining next week would need If a section is empty, write "None". Do not summarise the discussion. NOTES: [paste]
Run it on your three messiest meetings
Test on genuinely bad notes, not tidy ones. Watch for actions being invented from discussion that was not a commitment — "we should probably look at that" is not an action, and models routinely promote it to one.
Add the rules the failures taught you
Each failure becomes an explicit rule. "Only list an action if someone committed to doing it; discussion of possibilities is an open question, not an action" is the one most people end up adding.
Use it for two weeks before changing it
Resist tuning it further until you have used it in anger. The problems you imagine and the problems you have are different sets, and the format only proves itself when you go looking for something you half-remember.
You should end up with
A meeting notes prompt and three processed meetings in a consistent format.
Done when
- Unstated owners and deadlines are flagged, never invented
- Speculative discussion is not promoted to an action
- Three meetings produce identically structured output
If you want to go further
- Add a step that lists actions still open from previous meetings
- Produce a one-paragraph version for people who were not there