Meeting notes to an action list

Why 'list the action items' fails

Paste a transcript and ask for the action items, and you get a plausible flat list — no owners, no dates, decisions quietly reworded into tasks, and gaps filled with things nobody actually said. The fix is structural: make the model sort before it extracts, into three lists that are not interchangeable, and force it to mark anything it inferred rather than heard. The difference between 'Priya will send the figures by Friday' heard and inferred is the difference between an action list and a work of fiction.

Step 1 — Get the record in, safely

Paste whatever you have — a transcript, your typed notes, even a photo of the whiteboard described in a sentence. Worse input just means more open questions at the end, which is honest. One habit before pasting: if the meeting touched client names, figures or anything your workplace would call confidential, swap those details for placeholders first and restore them afterwards — the same swap covered in our AI privacy checklist.

Step 2 — Sort into three lists

This is the prompt that does the real work. It separates what was settled from what was assigned from what was merely raised — and it puts square brackets around everything the model is guessing.

Below is a meeting record. Sort what was actually said into exactly three lists.

DECISIONS — things agreed as settled. Record each in the words closest to what was said.
ACTIONS — things a person is to do. For each, give the owner and the deadline only if they were genuinely stated. If you are inferring either one, put your suggestion in square brackets, like [suggest: Priya — she raised it], and never present a guess as a fact.
OPEN QUESTIONS — things raised but not resolved.

Do not turn a decision into an action, or an open question into either. If something fits none of the lists, leave it out rather than force it in.

Step 3 — Chase the gaps, not the list

Look at what came back in brackets. Those are not formatting quirks — they are the things the meeting never actually nailed down. An action with a [suggested] owner is an action nobody agreed to do. That is the real output of this exercise: a short list of gaps to close while the meeting is still warm.

For every action above that has a suggested owner or date in square brackets, draft the one-line message I should send to close the gap — addressed to the likeliest person, phrased as a question ('are you picking this up, and by when?') rather than an assignment. Keep each under 25 words.

Step 4 — The five-minute check

Before the list goes anywhere, three quick checks — in this order, because the cost of an error runs downhill from the top.

1. 1Read the DECISIONS against your own memory first. A wrongly recorded decision is the most expensive mistake in the document — it rewrites what the meeting meant.
2. 2Spot-check two ACTIONS against the raw record — the two that matter most, not the two at the top.
3. 3Confirm every [suggested] item stays visibly a suggestion until its person says yes. Do not quietly promote brackets to facts when tidying.

Make it the way you always do it

Save the sorting prompt somewhere you can reach it — it belongs in your prompt library. The gain compounds when the output is the same shape every week: people learn where to look for their name, decisions stop being relitigated because they were recorded at the time, and the open-questions list becomes next meeting's agenda without anyone writing one.