Writing Meeting Minutes – Shorter is Better

May 15, 2012 | How-to and Meeting Tips

Don’t like writing meeting minutes? You are not alone. Once you know a few tricks however, it is not that hard and with the right tool it is not a lot of work and will help you to get things done.

So why would you write meeting minutes? First, it adds structure to your conversation, keeps you focused and forces you to conclude each topic with a clear outcome. Second, it creates a clear record of what was discussed, what was decided and who is responsible. Third, no need to discuss the same issue multiple times (provided you can easily search your minutes). If you do not record your meeting, you might as well not have it.

Here are some simple tips and tricks to make it easier.

  1. Make sure your minutes have a clear outline:
    • Title
    • List of invitees
    • Start and end date and time
    • List of topics with short notes, clear decisions and well defined tasks
    • Task summary
    • Date and time for next meeting
  2. Be to the point, only record the key points for each topic
  3. Make sure to document the outcome for each topic – there should be a decision and/or task. If there is no decision and/or task, you wasted the time spent on that topic.
  4. Distribute the minutes to all participants as soon as possible after the meeting.

These rules apply regardless of the method you use to create your meeting minutes. MeetingKing makes writing minutes easier than using Word, email and a task manager. If you haven’t done so, watch the video how MeetingKing works at http://meetingking.com/tutorial-1-basics/

This weekend there was a great article on Lifehacker about writing in general “Write Less, Say More: The Power of Brevity”. I think this applies very much to meeting minutes.

I hope we are helping you to have more effective meetings.

About Post Author

Edwin Siebesma

Edwin is the former CEO of WinZip Computing as well as VP of sales of the largest electronics and appliances retail chain in The Netherlands and VP of commercial affairs of a large retail chain in Peru. In all these capacities he attended and chaired many meetings and was frustrated by the lack of an integrated tool that followed the entire workflow around meetings from preparing the agenda, writing the minutes to manage tasks. There are many task management tools and note-taking solutions, but nothing covered all stages of a meeting. After leaving WinZip Edwin started Meeting king to help people have more effective meetings.

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