Meeting Minutes and Decision Log

Parent: Writing and Documentation · researched 2026-05-29T19:10:50.902Z· 6 sources · 0 concepts · skill meeting-minutes-and-decision-log

Three distinct artifacts:

Overview

Three distinct artifacts: [source]
Agenda - written before the meeting. Forward-looking. [source]
Minutes - written during/after. Outcomes, decisions, action items, dissent on the record. Backward-looking and durable. [source]
Decision Log / ADR - written when a decision is significant enough to outlive the meeting. One decision per record, indexed, immutable once accepted. [source]

1. The four load-bearing fields

Every captured decision must answer: [source]
What was decided - a single declarative sentence, not a description of the debate. [source]
Why - the one or two reasons that tipped it. Trade-offs accepted. Alternatives rejected. [source]
Who owns it - exactly one named person per action item. Co-ownership is no ownership. [source]
When - a specific date, not "soon" or "next sprint". [source]

2. Agenda vs minutes — separate documents, different tense

Agenda items are intent ("discuss pricing tier rollout"). Minutes items are outcome ("decided to defer pricing tier rollout to Q3; revisit June 15 sync"). [source]

3. Sync vs async minutes

Sync minutes (live meeting): Capture only what is needed to reconstruct outcomes. Skip the back-and-forth. Aim for ~10% the length of the conversation. [source]
Async minutes (Slack thread, Loom comment chain): The thread is the discussion. The minutes job is to write the synthesis at the top. [source]

4. Verbatim quote vs paraphrase

Use a verbatim quote in three cases only: [source]
On-the-record dissent [source]
A specific commitment [source]
A regulatory / legal trigger [source]
Everywhere else, paraphrase. [source]

5. Decisions live in a log, not in the meeting file

Significant decisions should be extracted into a separate decision log (or ADR file) with a stable ID, indexed, and linked back to the meeting. [source]

6. The ADR form for technical decisions

Michael Nygard's 2011 template: Title · Status · Context · Decision · Consequences [source]
Status moves through: proposed → accepted → deprecated → superseded by ADR-NNNN. ADRs are never deleted or edited substantively after acceptance - they are superseded by a new ADR that links back. [source]

7. Capture dissent on the record

Name the dissenter and one-sentence their objection. "Anonymous 'concerns were raised'" is useless and reads as cover. [source]

8. Outcome-oriented language

Bad: "We talked about the latency issue for a while." [source]
Good: "Decided to roll back the v2.3 caching change; Priya owns rollback PR by Wed." [source]
Every bullet should start with a verb of outcome (decided, agreed, deferred, rejected, assigned, scheduled, escalated). [source]

9. Distribute fast, freeze faster

Minutes that go out 5 days later are minutes nobody reads. Target: same-day or next-morning. [source]

Anti-Patterns

Transcript-as-minutes - paragraphs of "Then Bob said... then Alice responded..." [source]
Anonymous dissent ("concerns were raised") [source]
Decisions buried in the discussion [source]
Action items without an owner or date [source]
Co-owned action items - "Priya and Jordan" means neither one [source]

References

Michael Nygard, "Documenting Architecture Decisions" (2011) [source]
Wrike, "Meeting minutes template with action items" [source]
Atlassian Confluence, "Meeting Notes Template" [source]

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