You have probably been part of many meetings where you felt it would have been much better if we took meeting notes during it.
In-meeting notes make teamwork easy, keep your team accountable, and make meetings more actionable. Long story short, meeting notes is a high-impact practice that needs to be part of every modern organization.
However, few people know how to take advantage of meeting notes, and often, it is a question of where to start and what to include. Templates solve this problem pretty well.
Hence, this blog post will look at an ideal template you can use for your meeting notes.
Meeting notes template (what to include)
Rough notes
These are notes taken during the meeting in the order they are being communicated. There is only chronological structure and nothing else.
Rough notes help you take down critical information without having to spend time getting them organized during the meeting.
Sub-topics discussed
These are the main topics touched upon in the meeting. Topics are usually added to the notes after the meeting is done.
And in some cases, when the topics are shared beforehand, and there is a clear structure to the meeting's direction, the topics can be added before the meeting commences.
Key points/Summary
The data points shared, points of agreement and disagreement, results of consensus passed in the meeting, etc., are some things you should include in this section.
The goal is to make it easy for anyone to review the notes, even if they don't want to read the entire meeting notes document.
Action items
Probably the most important, you could look at action items to keep the attendees accountable for things agreed upon in the meeting.
These should include all the things that need to be done for the meeting to be considered effective.
Attendees
A list of attendees to track who attended the meeting and who didn't.
POCs
The POCs are people responsible for specific topics, action items, questions/clarifications, etc.
They are critical to delegate responsibilities of the meeting's actionables so that the onus of following up and getting things done doesn't fall on one person.
Ideal meeting template (how it can look)
Below is a possible structure/template for meetings notes, so feel free to use it or modify it according to your preference.
Main Topic:
Date:
Facilitator:
List of attendees:
Rough Pointers:
Point A (Sub-topic Tags)
Point B (Sub-topic Tags)
Point C (Sub-topic Tags)
Action Items:
Action Item 1 (POC)
Action Item 2 (POC)
Action Item 3 (POC)
Action Item 4 (POC)
Sub-topics Discussed:
Topic (Tag & Topic Owner)
Topic (Tag & Topic Owner)
Topic (Tag & Topic Owner)
Summary/key points:
Final thoughts
This is a simple yet powerful meeting notes template you can use immediately. You can take notes right on the meeting page on Routine, thereby removing the hassle of finding a place to note them down.
With Routine, you also have the option to add action items right in the meeting notes.
So what are your thoughts on this template? Let us know on Twitter at @RoutineHQ. Thanks for reading.
