How to write meeting minutes, with an example and a template

Meeting minutes are a short written record of a meeting: when it happened, who attended, what was on the agenda, what was decided, and who will do what by when. Good minutes don’t transcribe the conversation. They capture the outcome. Send them to everyone within a day so the whole group works from the same version of the decisions.

What should meeting minutes include?

Minutes don’t have to be long, and most fit on a single page. What they can’t do is skip any of these, because the gap shows up the first time someone goes looking:

• Meeting name, date, time and place (or the app, if it was on Zoom, Meet or Teams)
• Who attended, and who sent apologies
• The agenda, in the order it was set before the meeting
• A two or three sentence summary of the discussion for each item
• Decisions, one per line
• Action items, each with an owner and a due date
• Open questions, and who will come back with an answer
• The date of the next meeting

Decisions and action items are the parts people actually reread. Nobody opens the minutes two weeks later to remember the mood of the room. They open them to check what was agreed, so put decisions under their own heading instead of burying them in the discussion summary.

Listing who was absent feels like a formality until someone says they never heard about a decision. Then that one line settles it.

How to write meeting minutes, step by step

1. Write the agenda before the meeting. It becomes the skeleton of your minutes, and during the meeting you only fill in the gaps.
2. Say up front who’s taking minutes. If the person chairing the meeting also tries to write everything down, both jobs suffer.
3. Record outcomes, not dialogue. Instead of “Ahmet thinks the budget won’t cover it,” write “Budget to be revisited at the December meeting.” Note who said what only when it matters for the decision.
4. Read the decisions back before people leave. “Here’s what we agreed, is that right?” takes a minute or two and heads off the “that’s not how I understood it” email later.
5. Give every action item a name and a date. “Prepare the deck” isn’t an action item. “Selin prepares the deck by November 14” is.
6. Send them the same day. Minutes written a week later are mostly guesswork. Put the meeting name and date in the email subject so they’re easy to search for months from now.

Keep the tone flat. Minutes shouldn’t editorialize (“Kerem objected again”). Use plain past tense and drop the adjectives.

A meeting minutes example

Here’s a filled-in example from a software team’s weekly meeting. The names and topics are made up for illustration, so swap in your own.

# Weekly product meeting: minutes

Date: November 4, 2026, 10:00-10:45
Location: Google Meet
Minutes by: Ece
Attendees: Ece (product), Kerem (engineering), Selin (design), Murat (support)
Apologies: Deniz (on leave)

## Agenda
1. New sign-up screen
2. Password reset tickets
3. November release date

## Discussion
1. Sign-up screen: Selin showed two designs. The team agreed on
   the second one, which has fewer steps.
2. Password resets: Murat said most support tickets in the last
   two weeks were about password resets.
3. November release: Kerem said the release shouldn't ship until
   the checkout bug is fixed. The team agreed.

## Decisions
- Go ahead with the second sign-up design.
- November release moved to November 20.

## Action items
- [ ] Selin: share the final version of design two (Nov 7)
- [ ] Kerem: fix the checkout bug (Nov 14)
- [ ] Murat: list password reset tickets with examples (Nov 6)

## Open questions
- Why is the password reset email arriving late? Kerem to look into it.

## Next meeting
November 11, 2026, 10:00

Notice how short the discussion section is. The meeting ran 45 minutes, but the minutes only keep what you need to understand each decision.

A meeting minutes template you can copy

Paste this into your notes app, Notion or a Google Doc. Fill in the brackets and delete any heading you don’t need.

# [Meeting name]: minutes

Date: [date, time]
Location: [room, or Zoom / Meet / Teams]
Minutes by: [name]
Attendees: [name (role), name (role)]
Apologies: [name (reason)]

## Agenda
1. [item]
2. [item]

## Discussion
1. [item]: [two or three sentences on the options discussed]
2. [item]: [...]

## Decisions
- [decision, one clear sentence]

## Action items
- [ ] [owner]: [task] ([due date])

## Open questions
- [question] ([who will answer])

## Next meeting
[date, time]

If you want separate formats for one-on-ones, client meetings or retrospectives, there are five more in our meeting notes templates post.

How to take minutes in an online meeting

Taking minutes on Zoom, Meet or Teams is easier in one way and harder in another. Easier, because everyone is looking at a screen, so you can share the minutes document while you write. When a decision goes down in writing, everyone reads it at the same moment and a wrong word gets fixed on the spot.

Harder, because people talk over each other and connections drop, and a sentence goes missing. If the audio cuts out, ask someone to repeat what they just said. A missed decision costs far more later than ten seconds of awkwardness now.

Move any links and files from the chat into the minutes, since the chat is hard to find once the call ends. If you record the meeting, say so at the start and get everyone’s agreement. A recording lets you check a line you weren’t sure about, though listening back to rewrite the minutes takes hours. We cover recording and host permission in how to record a Zoom meeting.

Common mistakes when taking minutes

The most common one is turning the minutes into a transcript. When everything is written down nobody reads it, and the decision gets lost in the noise. If you need the full conversation, that’s what a recording or transcript is for.

Second is the action item with no owner. “Follow up with the client” has no subject, and a week later everyone assumes someone else did it. Start every action item with a name.

Then there’s sending them late. By the time minutes arrive three days later, people have already acted on their own memory of the meeting, and the document lands in an archive instead of lining anyone up.

The last one is softening decisions. “Postponing the release could be considered” is not a decision. If the release was postponed, write “postponed.” If nobody decided, move it to open questions.

Do you have to write them by hand?

No. qatip records Zoom, Meet and Teams calls from your Mac or Windows computer without a bot joining, and in-person meetings from your phone. A few minutes after the meeting you get a summary, decisions, action items with owners and dates, and open questions, and you can email the report to everyone who was there in one click. Add the template above as your own and reports come out with those exact sections. See how it works on the meeting minutes page.