Stop 1 of 7 · Daily
Meetings into decisions
Five minutes after the meeting ends, the decisions have owners and dates and the channel has been told.
The five minutes that decide whether the meeting counted
Alex sits in twenty meetings a week. The ones worth the hour are the ones where a decision left the room attached to a name and a date. The rest are conversations that four people will remember four different ways in three weeks.
Teams transcribes most of Alex's recurring meetings. A transcript is not notes. It is eight thousand words of "yeah, so", and nobody opens it again. The work is turning it into four lines while the meeting is still warm, in the gap before the next call.
One rule holds the whole stop up. A decision has an owner and a date, or it is not a decision. When Claude hands back a decision with neither, that is a real gap in the meeting, and the five minutes after is when you can still close it with a message.
Three things come out of a transcript
| What it is | The test | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Decision | Someone chose between options | The decisions list, owner and date |
| Action | Someone agreed to do a thing | The follow-up message, initials and date |
| Open question | Discussed, nobody chose | The next agenda, with the decider named |
Try this
[paste the Teams transcript] Build a table with decision, owner, due date and the sentence in the transcript it came from. Then list separately anything that was discussed but never decided, so I can put it on the next agenda. Use initials for names. If a decision has no owner or no date anywhere in the transcript, write "unassigned" and put those rows at the top.
From that table, write the message I post in the Teams channel. Under 120 words. Decisions first as a short list with initials and dates, then the open questions with the name of the person who has to decide each one, then one line asking people to correct anything wrong by end of day tomorrow.
[paste the transcript] I was not in this one. In under 150 words: what was decided, what it changes for my team, and anywhere my name came up. List separately anything the room assumed I would do, so I can accept it or push back today.