How to write meeting minutes

What minutes are for

Minutes answer three questions a week later: what did we decide, who is doing what, and what is still open? If a person who missed the meeting can read your minutes and know what to do, you did it right.

Minutes are not a transcript. Nobody needs to read that Bruno said “I think, maybe, we could”. They need to read “Agreed: launch moves to 20 October.”

Step by step

1. 1Prepare before the meeting. Copy the agenda into your minutes page. Each agenda item becomes a heading, so you only fill in the gaps.
2. 2Write down who is there. List the people present and absent in the first two minutes, before the discussion starts.
3. 3Listen for results, not words. For each agenda item, write what was decided, who does what by when, and what is still open.
4. 4Ask when it is unclear. If a task has no owner or no date, ask: “Who owns this, and by when?” It is your job, not an interruption.
5. 5Clean it up the same day. Rewrite your notes into the format within a few hours, while you still remember.
6. 6Send and store. Send the minutes to everyone who was invited, and keep them where the team can find them.

The format

Your team may already use a page in Google Docs, Word or a wiki. That is fine: what matters is the order of the parts, not the tool. A ready version is on the meeting minutes template page.

Rules that keep minutes useful

• One task, one owner, one date. “Marketing will look at it” is not a task. “Lina to send three headline options by Tuesday” is.
• Neutral words. Write what was decided, not how people felt. No “Marcus was upset”, no “a great idea from Priya”.
• Past tense for decisions, future for tasks. Agreed, decided, approved. Will send, will check.
• Names, not “he” or “they”. A week later nobody remembers who “he” was.
• Numbers and dates exactly as said. If you did not catch a number, ask. A wrong number in the minutes becomes the official number.
• Same day. Minutes sent the next week are history, not a tool.

What not to write

• Every word of the discussion. Write the result.
• Jokes, side chats, and who arrived late.
• Opinions about people, and your own opinion.
• Private or HR topics that came up by accident. If something sensitive was discussed, ask the chair what goes in.
• Guesses. If you are not sure what was decided, write it as an open question and ask.

One exception: formal minutes of a board or a committee often must record who proposed a motion, who seconded it and how people voted. If that is your case, follow your organisation's rules, and see the board meeting template.

A full example

Here is a fifteen-minute stand-up of a product team, written as minutes. The meeting covered a payments migration, a mobile beta, a dark theme, slow offline maps and a price change at the email provider.

Daily stand-up: autumn release plan, 1 October 2026
Present: Emma Carter (product lead), Marcus Bell (backend), Priya Nair (mobile).

Updates
Payments migration done: all subscribers moved to the new billing provider.
Mobile beta: 2,000 testers, crash rate 0.5%. Top requests: faster offline maps, dark theme.

Decisions
Agreed to ship the dark theme this sprint, behind a feature flag.
Agreed to move the referral program to next sprint, after legal review.
Agreed to add a European region for map tiles this sprint.

Action items
Design to hand the color tokens to Marcus by Wednesday.
Marcus to ship the dark theme behind a flag, next sprint.
Priya to set up the European tile region, this sprint (about two days).
Priya to post the beta metrics in the team channel today.
Marcus to write up the billing migration notes today.

Open questions
Email provider raised prices. Marcus to compare two alternatives; decision in a month.

Next
Board meeting on Friday: Emma to present the plan above.

Notice what is missing: who said what first, how long the dark theme debate took, and the comment that “nothing caught fire”. Notice also the first action item: the owner is “Design”, a team, because the call did not name a person. In real minutes, that is the moment to ask “who in design?”

If English is not your first language

Minutes are one of the easiest things to write in a second language, because the grammar is simple and the phrases repeat. We collected twenty common mistakes and their fixes on a separate page: meeting minutes in English.