Take meeting notes in three letters and send the follow-up within the hour

The meeting ends with a fair idea of what was decided, and everyone goes back to their desk. The follow-up email, the one that turns the meeting into work, slips to tomorrow and then to Thursday. By then nobody is sure who offered to call the landlord, and the next meeting opens by repeating half of this one.

The fix is a small note-taking habit and one prompt. You mark the lines that matter while the meeting runs, and when it ends the prompt turns them into a draft email that you check against your notes before sending. By the end of today you’ll have the prompt saved and one follow-up sent, for a meeting you have today or for one earlier this week that never got its email. It works the same for a team meeting, a project review, a client call or a staff meeting at a school.

What a follow-up needs

A useful follow-up is short, and it holds only this:

• Decisions: what the group agreed, one line each.
• Actions: who does what, and by when. An action with no name belongs to nobody, and one with no date happens “soon”.
• Open questions: what is still unresolved, and who is finding out.

The discussion that got you there can stay in your notes. People open a follow-up to find their own name and their own date, so put those where nobody can miss them.

Three letters while the meeting runs

During the meeting, start the lines that matter with a letter and a colon:

• D: for a decision
• A: for an action
• Q: for an open question

Write anything else as you normally would, or not at all. You don’t need full minutes: the letters mark the few lines you’ll need later, on paper or in a notes app. For example, notes from a made-up team meeting might look like this:

Numbers for the quarter fine, no changes
D: no new software subscriptions until January
A: Priya - list current subscriptions and renewal dates, by Friday
Q: does the freeze include the training platform? Priya asks finance
Long talk about the conference, nothing settled
A: Tom sends the slides

The last line is typical. Tom will send the slides, but nobody said when. Leave it as it is, and the prompt will flag it.

The habit has a side effect worth having. Once you’re used to it, you catch yourself about to write an A with no name, and you ask “who’s taking that?” before the meeting moves on, while everyone is still in the room to answer.

The prompt

For a short meeting with a decision or two, skip the assistant: copy your marked lines into an email, tidy the wording and send. The prompt pays off when the notes run long or several people took on tasks.

Save it where you can find it in ten seconds, in a note or a text file. If you’re starting to collect prompts that work, keep them in one place. It works in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot.

Below are my notes from a meeting. Lines that start with "D:" are decisions, "A:" are actions and "Q:" are open questions, but some important points may not be marked.

Meeting: [name and date]
People present: [names]

Write a follow-up with these sections:

1. Decisions: only what the group clearly agreed, one line each.
2. Actions: a table with the columns Owner | Action | Due date.
   - Use only owners and dates stated in the notes.
   - If no owner was named, write UNCLEAR. If no date was given, write UNCLEAR.
   - Do not guess, and do not assign a task because of someone's role.
3. Open questions: what is unresolved, and who is finding out, if anyone.
4. Not agreed: ideas or proposals someone raised that the group did not accept. Never list these as decisions.

Then write a follow-up email to the people present, under 150 words, plain and friendly. Start with a subject line that names the meeting and the date. List the decisions and actions, and ask the group to fill in each UNCLEAR item.

Notes:
[paste your notes here]

Two rules do most of the work. UNCLEAR makes the assistant less likely to fill a gap with a plausible guess, which is what these tools tend to do when nothing tells them otherwise. The “not agreed” section gives ideas that were floated and never settled somewhere to go other than the decisions.

Meeting notes often mention clients or colleagues. If you’re unsure what your assistant does with what you paste, Before you upload a client document lists what to check. For your first run, the made-up notes below work just as well.

A worked example

Everything in this example is made up. Here are Eva’s notes from a planning meeting about an office move:

Office move planning, Oct 14. Present: Ana, Ben, Carla, David, Eva
D: we move on the weekend of Nov 21-22
D: Ben's team packs on Friday afternoon, Nov 20
A: Carla - book the movers after 2 quotes, by Oct 23
A: Ana - floor plan for new office, desks and meeting room
Q: who keeps the old office keys until the lease ends?
David: maybe hire cleaners for the old office? depends on cost
A: tell clients the new address
Q: is internet at the new office the landlord's job? Ben checks

A correct result looks like this (trimmed):

Decisions
- The move is on the weekend of November 21-22.
- Ben's team packs on Friday afternoon, November 20.

Actions
Owner   | Action                                 | Due date
Carla   | Book the movers after getting 2 quotes | Oct 23
Ana     | Floor plan for the new office          | UNCLEAR
UNCLEAR | Tell clients the new address           | UNCLEAR

Open questions
- Who keeps the old office keys until the lease ends? (nobody assigned)
- Is internet at the new office the landlord's job? (Ben is checking)

Not agreed
- Hiring cleaners for the old office (David's idea; depends on cost)

And the email:

Subject: Office move, decisions and actions (Oct 14)

Hi all,

Thanks for today. We agreed:
- We move on the weekend of November 21-22.
- Ben's team packs on Friday afternoon, November 20.

Actions:
- Carla: book the movers after getting two quotes, by October 23.
- Ana: floor plan for the new office. Ana, when can you have it ready?
- Telling clients the new address: who'd like to take this, and by when?

Still open: who keeps the old office keys, and whether internet is the landlord's job (Ben is checking). David's idea of hiring cleaners waits until we know the cost.

Eva

Run the prompt on these notes yourself and compare. If your assistant’s version names someone for the client email or gives Ana’s floor plan a date, that’s a guess. The checks below catch the same kind of guess in your own follow-ups.

Using a transcript instead of notes

If your meeting tool saves a transcript, you can paste it in place of your notes, replacing the prompt’s opening paragraph with “Below is a transcript of a meeting.” Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet can all save one, depending on your plan and your organization’s settings (checked in October 2026). If you use one, tell everyone at the start of the meeting. Some meeting tools also write an AI summary of their own, and it needs the same checks as any other draft.

A transcript brings its own errors. Speech recognition mishears names and numbers, so “fifteen” can turn into “fifty” and a surname can come out as an ordinary word. A transcript also records every half-formed thought, which gives the assistant more chances to read “we could look at that” as a decision. Take your D/A/Q notes anyway, because they’re what you check the transcript against.

Check before you send

Follow-up drafts go wrong in predictable ways. The assistant gives a task to the person who seems likely to do it rather than the one who agreed to, turns “let’s think about it” into a decision, or adds a deadline that sounds reasonable and that nobody said. Go through the draft with your notes beside it:

• Each owner said yes. For every action, find the moment that person agreed. If you can’t, the owner is UNCLEAR, whatever name the draft shows.
• Each date was said. A date that appears only in the draft was invented. Delete it, or turn it into a question for the owner.
• Each decision was settled. If someone could reply “I thought we were still discussing that”, move it to “not agreed”.
• Names and figures match. Compare names, amounts, dates and room numbers with your notes, especially when you worked from a transcript.

Fix what’s wrong by hand in the email; for a few words, that’s quicker than asking the assistant again. Then send it, gaps included. A follow-up with one UNCLEAR item that goes out within the hour asks its question while everyone still remembers the answer.

Try it today

Pick one meeting: one on your calendar today, or one from earlier this week whose follow-up never went out.

• A meeting today: before it starts, paste the prompt into a note and fill in the meeting’s name and the people present. Mark your lines with D, A and Q as it runs. When it ends, note the time, paste your notes in, run the four checks and send.
• A meeting from this week: open your notes from it and put a D, A or Q in front of the lines that count. Then fill in the prompt, run it, check the draft and send.

You’re done when the email is in people’s inboxes and every action in it has a name and a date, or an UNCLEAR that asks for one. For a meeting today, the finish line is less than an hour after it ended. Write down how long it took from the end of the meeting to “sent”: next time you’ll have a number to beat, and your own answer to whether the habit is worth keeping.

Each follow-up also leaves you a list of actions with owners and dates. Paste the ones that are yours into a running log, and Friday’s status report starts from a list instead of a blank page: A running log that turns into your weekly status report shows how to set one up. The actions you’re waiting on from other people, UNCLEAR items included, fit in a six-column tracker. And once your meetings end well, the next step is to start them well: Prepare a one-page brief before meeting someone new.