minutes

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Meeting minutes templates that people actually fill in

Four templates in plain markdown — copy them straight into your notes app, wiki, or repo. They’re deliberately short: the graveyard of meeting documentation is full of beautiful templates nobody filled in twice. Below them, the two-minute version of what belongs in minutes at all.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-11Copy-paste ready
The Templates

Standard team meeting

# Team Meeting — {date}

**Attendees:** {names}
**Facilitator:** {name}

## Agenda
1. {topic}
2. {topic}

## Discussion
- {topic}: {key points, disagreements, context}

## Decisions
- {decision} — decided by {who}, because {why}

## Action items
- [ ] {task} — @{owner}, due {date}

## Parking lot
- {deferred topic}

Board / formal meeting

# {Organization} Board Meeting Minutes

**Date/Time:** {date, start–end}
**Location:** {place / video}
**Present:** {names, roles}
**Absent:** {names}
**Quorum:** {yes/no}

## Call to order
Called to order at {time} by {chair}.

## Approval of prior minutes
Minutes of {date} were {approved / amended}.

## Reports
- {Officer/Committee}: {summary}

## Motions
- MOTION: {text}. Moved {name}, seconded {name}.
  Vote: {for}–{against}–{abstain}. {Carried/Failed}.

## Adjournment
Adjourned at {time}. Next meeting: {date}.

Respectfully submitted, {secretary}

Action-item-focused (standup / working session)

# {Project} Working Session — {date}

## What changed since last time
- {update}

## Blockers
- {blocker} — needs {who/what}

## Action items
- [ ] {task} — @{owner}, due {date}
- [ ] {task} — @{owner}, due {date}

## Next checkpoint
{date} — success looks like: {criteria}

1:1 meeting

# 1:1 — {name} & {name}, {date}

## Their agenda
- {topic}

## My agenda
- {topic}

## Notes
- {what was actually said}

## Commitments
- [ ] {mine} — due {date}
- [ ] {theirs} — due {date}

## Follow up next time
- {thread to pull}
What Belongs In Minutes

Minutes are not a transcript. They exist to answer three future questions: what did we decide, who owes what by when, and why did we choose this over the alternative. Everything else — the winding discussion, the tangents — is context that a template can safely drop. Write decisions with their reasons (“chose monthly billing because annual was blocking mid-market deals”), action items with a single owner and a date, and nothing without one of those.

The formal board template is the exception: it’s a legal record, so it captures motions, votes, and quorum precisely and skips discussion detail almost entirely. Don’t use it for working meetings; don’t use the working templates for board meetings.

Or Stop Filling In Templates

Full disclosure: we publish this page and we also build the tool that makes it partly obsolete. Minutes (open source, free) records the meeting, transcribes it on your device, and — once you connect an assistant (Claude via MCP, or a local LLM) — fills in the structure above automatically: attendees, decisions, and action items as structured YAML in a markdown file on your own disk. The template becomes the output format, not homework. Templates still win for meetings you don’t record, and formal board minutes where a human secretary is the point.

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