From Huddle to Action: How to Take Effective Meeting Notes

Meetings can help drive productivity, providing opportunities for brainstorming, collaboration, decision-making, and feedback. But how often have you walked out of a meeting without clarity, unsure what to do next?

While research shows that writing notes by hand is helpful for memory recall and conceptual understanding, digital note-taking is equally important to maintain focus, capture important information, and share action items.

Learn how to take meeting notes, best practices for capturing more effective meeting notes, and which note-taking tools can save you time.

What are meeting notes?

Meeting notes are a written record of key discussions, decisions, action items, and takeaways from a meeting. When done right, they capture important information and give attendees a clear idea of what to do next. They also keep anyone who didn’t attend the meeting up to date.

Good meeting notes usually include:

• A summary of the meeting agenda and outcomes
• Action items assigned to specific teams/individuals, with deadlines
• Items to discuss in future meetings
• Answers to questions that came up during the meeting
• Open-ended questions (specifying who to follow up with)
• Key decisions, takeaways, and next steps

Types of meeting notes

Meeting notes can vary depending on what you want to convey. You can choose from different styles: business meeting notes, staff meeting notes, weekly meeting notes, personal reflection notes, collaborative notes, and project-specific notes.

Each type serves a specific purpose. For instance:

• Business meeting notes generally summarize discussions and point to high-level action items.
• Weekly meeting notes typically highlight key points from a team meeting, including statuses and deadlines.
• Project status meeting notes can offer a quick update on specific project progress, challenges, and next steps.

Difference between meeting notes and minutes

Similar to transcripts, meeting minutes are a more formal record of what was said in a meeting. They mainly serve as formal documentation of what happened during a board meeting or an official gathering. They can be also used for auditing and legal purposes.

Meeting notes are more informal summaries of main takeaways and action items. Often used to aid collaboration, meeting notes might capture brainstorming ideas, blockers, or quick project updates.

How to take meeting notes effectively

Effective note-taking doesn’t just take place during the meeting itself. For better meeting notes, start the process in advance and follow up after a meeting. Follow these four steps to take better, more effective meeting notes.

1. Choose a note-taking method

Note-taking techniques can vary, so it’s important to choose one that works best for your purposes. Here are two to consider:

The Cornell Method

With the Cornell note-taking method, you divide the page into three sections:

• Notes and thoughts
• Questions and takeaways
• Summary

You can also add a title at the top. This method is best for linear learners.

Mind mapping

The mind-mapping method involves creating a graphic representation of ideas, thoughts, and discussions. It’s helpful for nonlinear and visual learners. It can also help gather insights from several meetings to identify common ideas and themes.

2. Prepare your workspace

Since meetings can move fast, it’s best to prepare your document or workspace beforehand. For example:

• Open a document, Slack canvas, or digital workspace where your notes will live.
• Create a meeting notes template to save yourself time and provide consistency.
• Pre-populate your document with the meeting agenda, and share it with your team.

3. Take notes

Next, determine how you’ll take notes: by hand, on a laptop, or with an automated AI note-taking tool. The meeting host isn’t typically the best person to take detailed notes because they’re busy leading the conversation. If you don’t think you can successfully manage both, delegate another person, or task an AI agent with note-taking. If you use Slack huddles, you can have Slack AI take notes for you within the huddle.

4. Refine and share your notes

After the meeting, review and clean up your notes, identifying only the most important information. Finally, share your notes with all participants and any other stakeholders who weren’t present.

Slack users can share and tag people for visibility or follow-ups directly in channels. They can also generate task lists based on meeting notes.

Essential elements to include in your meeting notes

Need to know what to document? Make sure these elements make it into your meeting notes.

• Agenda summary
• Action items
• Decisions
• Follow-ups
• Takeaways

 

Choosing the right note-taking tools and techniques

The right tools can save you time and help you take more accurate, actionable meeting notes. Workers say they save 97 minutes a week with Slack AI, giving them more time for focused work. Here’s how.

Use meeting notes templates for clarity and consistency

Meeting notes templates establish a clear structure for capturing critical action items and takeaways. Using the same template every time makes it easier for stakeholders to find the information they need at a glance. This also saves you setup time for each meeting.

You can find customizable, free meeting notes templates online such as Slack’s weekly sync template. Many of the principles from the Cornell Method apply, incorporating questions, notes, thoughts, and summary in your template.

If you use a mind-mapping method, look for a digital whiteboard, workspace, or canvas with visual mapping features.

Record and transcribe meetings with AI

Manually writing meeting notes in real time is cumbersome, and it’s easy to miss major points. Online meeting tools like Slack huddles can record meetings in full and share links, documents, or messages, so you can review the conversation later. These same apps are useful for capturing in-person or hybrid meetings.

Streamline the note-taking process even further with AI-powered tools like huddle notes and Otter.ai. These AI meeting assistants automatically generate meeting notes and action items from a recording. If they’re connected through Slack, you can automatically share notes in relevant channels to get to work faster.

Strategies for writing efficient meeting notes during meetings

Taking meeting notes can be simple, but when you’re getting started, it’s common to make mistakes. You may try to capture too much information and miss out on participation opportunities, or you may not write down enough and forget key details later. But with practice and structure, note-taking can become easy and effective.

Capture key discussion points without losing context

To capture the essence of the meeting, try noting only the most relevant meeting details rather than capturing every word. Here are some examples:

• Jennifer shared progress on Project X. It’s on track to meet the next milestone.
• Two new team members start next week. Scott will lead onboarding and send out 1:1 meeting invites.

Identify action items in conversations

Action items will come up during the meeting, and it’s the note-taker’s job to capture them. To ensure follow-up, action items must be clear and specific. Listen for keywords like:

• Next steps…
• Responsible for…
• Take care of…
• We need to…
• It would be great if…
• Let’s make sure we…
• Can you handle…

Listen actively during discussions. If needed, clarify any vague assignments by asking for specifics on who, what, and when. Then document the action item immediately, including the task, owner, and deadline. If using lists or canvases, you can tag the appropriate team members with their assigned action items within Slack.

Best practices for organizing meeting notes post-meeting

In the moment, it’s common to take notes chronologically. Afterward, you may want to restructure your notes slightly to highlight the most important information. With time, you’ll learn to do this as you go. If using AI-generated meeting summaries, you should still double-check the text of transcripts and meeting summaries before sharing to ensure it makes logical sense.

Enhance readability and usefulness with formatting

Formatting makes your meeting notes legible and easy to follow. Use bullet points, checklists, and even emoji to make the notes scannable. Use active language and short sentences to make your notes easy to read. Consider bolding important dates or deadlines, so they’re easy to find.

Share notes to ensure team alignment

While everyone may be tempted to take their own notes, this opens the door for misunderstandings and misalignment. The more collaborative your meeting notes are, the more effective they typically will be for keeping everyone on the same page.

Have an AI agent or a designated note-taker share a master set of notes in a common place like a team channel or canvas. Then allow people to contribute and ask questions. You control who can see and edit these notes, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive information.

Slack AI search makes it easy to find key information by asking questions like, “What were the key takeaways of this meeting?” or “What action items were assigned to me in this meeting?”

Converting meeting notes into actionable plans

The real value in meeting notes (and meetings in general) is the actions they generate. So, what’s the best way to convert meeting notes into a plan of action? Lean on a centralized work operating system like Slack and use tools that increase visibility, collaboration, and alignment.

Incorporate meeting notes into project management tools

If you use project management software like Asana, Wrike, or ClickUp, consider how to integrate meeting notes into your existing workflows. One option is to enter tasks manually from your notes after a meeting. Another, faster option is to use third-party integrations like Zapier, which can automatically move info between Slack and the other apps you use every day.

To streamline task assignments, use a note-taking and collaboration tool that integrates with your project management software. For example, with Slack’s Asana integration, teams can turn Slack conversations or notes into actionable tasks in Asana. Integrations also allow you to pull up project statuses or shared documents during a meeting to check information in real time.

How to elevate your note-taking process with technology

AI can’t misplace its notebook or forget what was said. AI note-takers can generate meeting notes faster, speeding up the meeting-to-productivity pipeline and removing the potential for human error. Other advantages of using digital note-takers include:

• Searchable
• Sharable
• Collaborative
• Accessible
• Eliminates the need for manual transcription from one channel to another (like from paper to digital)

Video conferencing and note-taking in one place

No matter your preferred video conferencing tool, you can increase productivity by taking notes in the same platform. Slack, for instance, facilitates video calls with built-in huddle note-taking and project tracking on canvas. Integrations with Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet let teams start on the tool of their choice in any Slack channel.

Integrating voice-to-text features for greater efficiency

Transcription from a recording or voice-to-text tool takes efficiency a step further. Not only can AI tools generate a transcript and meeting summary, but they also can analyze, organize, and tag the automated meeting notes with key points and action items. For instance, Agentforce can suggest actions based on a call transcript and other context from channels.

With AI tools, you can save your team time and surface the most important information and next steps. In fact, 78% of workers say that automating routine tasks boosts their productivity and saves them more than three hours per week. Professionals using Agentforce in Slack report a 47% rise in productivity and say it’s much easier to find the information they need.

Grow productivity with automated meeting notes

Meetings are key to achieving goals, but without notes or follow-through, they can waste time and hurt productivity. Effective meeting notes help move conversations and projects forward with clarity, reminders, and accountability.

Following best practices and using the right tools to take, share, and collaborate on meeting notes will help you create a streamlined process that benefits your whole team.

Get everyone on the same page with Slack’s work operating system to start automating meeting notes and save more time. Explore solutions today.