Resource
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.
# 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}# {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}# {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 — {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}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.
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.
Next step
Whether you may record the meeting you are minuting.
Filling the template from audio instead of by hand.
Making finished minutes searchable by an assistant.
Dictating the notes rather than typing them.