Turn messy meeting notes into a short decision log with owners and dates

Capture raw notes without cleaning them

Paste or drop in:

• Your typed notes
• A transcript export (if you have one)
• Chat comments people left during the call
• The agenda, if one existed

Tell the model: “Do not invent decisions. Separate Decisions, Open questions, and Parking lot. Mark unclear items as [NEED].”

Cleaning too early makes you drop the awkward disagreement you still need to resolve.

Force a four-column decision log

Ask for this shape every time:

For each clear decision:
- Decision (one sentence)
- Why (one sentence, only if stated)
- Owner (name from the notes)
- Due date (only if stated; else [NEED date])
- First next step (one verb phrase)

Then: “List items that sounded like decisions but had no owner or date.”

That second list is where meetings usually leak.

Decisions vs discussion vs parking lot

Train the habit in the prompt:

• Decision — the room chose A over B (or chose to stop)
• Discussion — options, opinions, research still open
• Parking lot — important later, not this week

Ask the model to sort every bullet into one of those three. If it cannot tell, it goes in Open questions—not Decisions.

Name owners from the notes, not from vibes

Models love to invent “the team” as owner. Reject that.

Rules you paste every time:

• Owner must be a name that appears in the notes
• If no name, write [NEED owner]
• “We should” without a person is not a decision

A decision without an owner is a wish.

Close the loop in the same chat

After the log looks right:

1. “Draft a 8-line summary for Slack: decisions first, then open questions.”
2. “Draft calendar nudges: one line per owner + due date.”
3. Paste the Slack summary into the channel the same day

Speed matters. A perfect log that sits in your downloads folder is still a failed meeting.

A 15-minute after-meeting recipe

1. Export notes or paste raw bullets (2 min)
2. Run the decision-log prompt (3 min)
3. Fix [NEED] lines with the facilitator (5 min)
4. Post Slack summary + assign tasks (5 min)

Do this while context is fresh. Waiting until Friday turns every [NEED] into archaeology.

What the model should not own

• Choosing between two product directions the room avoided
• Inventing budget numbers or ship dates
• Softening a hard no into a maybe
• Assigning work to someone who was not in the meeting

If the transcript is ambiguous, the human facilitator clarifies in the room next time—or in a follow-up thread—not by letting the model guess.

Common failure modes

• Treating “we explored” as “we decided”
• Ten owners for one action
• Due dates that say “soon”
• Summaries that bury the decision under vibe paragraphs

Fix the prompt kit once. Reuse it. Consistency beats clever one-off prompts.

Worked example (pattern only)

Notes say: “Alex will ship the pricing page copy by Thursday. We talked about a redesign but did not choose a vendor.” A good log has one decision row (pricing page copy → Alex → Thursday) and one parking-lot or open-question row (redesign vendor — not decided). If the model merges those into “Alex will lead redesign,” you caught a hallucination before it became a task.

How a five-person team runs this week

After the next three meetings only, run the 15-minute recipe before anyone stands up. Compare: did Slack get a decision summary the same day? If not, the prompt is not the problem—the posting habit is. Fix posting before you add more AI steps.

Short close

Sort decisions from talk, name a person and a date, post the same day—that is the useful job.