A Quick Guide to Meeting Notes for Managers

Ever tried to take meeting notes while also leading a call? It's a mess. Your team's sitting there, watching you type away, momentum dying faster than a startup without funding. You and the team lose the momentum and train of thought.

As a manager, the meetings you lead are critical to the progress of the company and team. If a meeting isn't critical enough to justify having a clear and accurate record of what happened, it probably wasn't needed in the first place. 1-1's, planning sessions, quarterly updates and more all benefit deeply from top-tier note-taking.

Let's discuss how to take the best possible meetings notes. Then we'll talk about how to automate that process while still keeping your meeting notes customized for your needs as a manager.

What do effective meeting notes look like?

Forget everything you learned about detailed note-taking in school. The real world, especially in a startup, moves at breakneck speed. You simply won't have time to sit there and write, type, or try to recollect your thoughts in between calls.

Here's what really matters:

Start with an agenda.

Simplicity is king. Keep it concise.

Summarize the key points. What's the TL;DR of each?

Record all the action items. Who's doing what, by when?

Make it skimmable. No one's reading a novel.

Ensure accuracy. Misinterpretations can derail projects.

Note any disagreements or strategy shifts

Include relevant links and resources

So how should meeting notes for managers be structured?

Start with a quick summary. It's like the elevator pitch of your meeting. Then list out action items so clearly that even your sleep-deprived dev team can't misinterpret them.

You can copy and tweak this template. Save it in your notes as a template to quickly call on if you need.

Using AI to take meeting notes for you

AI tools can take away the annoying cumbersome parts like stopping to scribble down thoughts and organizing the notes after the fact.

The main tools that help here are:

AI voice transcribers, like OpenAI's Whisper

LLM's to organize those notes, like OpenAI's GPT or Anthropic's Claude

Transcribers aren't new, but the quality of them is. Imagine trying to record a meeting with Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa. You would probably be left with an incoherent jumble of nonsense instead of concise and an accurate transcription of the meeting.

AI transcribers are nearly perfectly accurate, giving you a full transcript of what was said on the call. This is useful for using an LLM to organize into structured discussion points and action items. But it's also helpful simply to have a record that you can refer to if you forget something that was said or a disagreement arises.

The nice thing about running AI prompts on meeting notes like this are that you can tweak the prompts to your needs. That means you can turn a meeting transcription into any format. You can even translate calls directly into plans or project proposals.

Ideally, you can do all of this right from within your notes. Set the agenda, record the actual meeting, and even the organization step after the call.

Here is a simple process you can follow:

#1 - Start the transcriber right before the call

Transcribing a meeting from within Reflect.

#2 - When the meeting is over, push stop and wait for the transcription to land in your daily note.

A raw meeting transcription in a daily note

#3 - Run whatever AI prompt you'd like on your meeting notes! You can see some custom ones and how to set them up here.

Make your meetings count

Your meeting notes are useless if there is no record of the decisions made or the action items that people need to do.

💡 Some tips to make your meetings more effective:

Add a meeting agenda to calendar invites beforehand.

Capture all of the context on the call. If you say something, it will be recorded.

Use the meeting transcript as your safety net, but don't expect people to read it.

Set deadlines and assignees for action items.

Review notes from the previous call at the start of the next meeting to pick up where you left off.

As a manager, your primary responsibility on the call should be contributing. But it's also your job to make sure everyone knows where to go next and has the ability to get there quickly and efficiently.

Follow-up with readable meeting notes

If your meeting was a success, the participants should be ready to get to work. It's up to whoever took notes to share the meeting summary and minutes with the team as quickly as possible, certainly within 24 hours of the meeting. Also in this time, schedule any check-ins or follow-ups that were discussed. You don't have to remember these manually. You can extract them from your transcription.

When the time comes, you can also use these meeting notes to prepare for the next call if it's an ongoing meeting or something that requires a follow-up meeting. By treating your meeting notes as a living document, you turn them from a passive record into an active tool for driving progress.

You might also decide to add collaboration into your meeting notes so that others can contribute and add their own thoughts and reflections after the fact. The important thing is to have a centralized knowledge base where people can reference information from the call.

Keeping private notes separate from the team

While you certainly want to share all valuable information with your team, you'll also likely want to record some personal thoughts, opinions, or information that would be inappropriate to share widely. This category of information is likely to be some of the most valuable to you personally as a manager.

You might find it valuable to even have two AI prompts to run on the transcription:

One for public notes that get shared with the team

One that includes your own private reflections

This way you don't have to self-censor your own thoughts in the meeting notes and miss this valuable information. It's also quite valuable to be able to know what information you recorded privately versus publicly.

Continuous Improvement: Iterating on Your Note-Taking Process

Like everything else in a startup, you should be constantly improving your notes without adding in unnecessary complexity. You'll certainly need to make changes as time goes on and the content and people you meet with evolves.

Here are some tips for improving your process:

Regularly ask for feedback on your notes from participants you share them with. Are they helpful? Clear? Actionable?

Experiment with different formats and prompts. What works for one team might not work for another.

Keep a pulse check on the information. Are you easily able to find what was discussed on the call and what needs to be done next?

When holes arise, address them. If someone forgot something they should do that was discussed on the call, make sure it was in the notes and that they had readily available access to them.

Wrapping It Up

The most important part of capturing information from a meeting is to have a transcription. As long as you have a full transcription, you know that everything was captured. So first and foremost, make sure you are transcribing all of your meetings.

How you organize the information from that transcription is largely up to you and your team. You might even decide to just share the transcription with the team so that they can organize their own notes. Or you might want to have everyone working out of one place and one document so that there is a single source of truth.

Whatever method, make sure that you are both collecting and sharing the valuable information that comes out of meetings. Otherwise, you're just wasting everyone's time. If you find there is no value in the notes from a meeting, it's likely the meeting was not needed in the first place.

And don't forget to record your own private thoughts and reflections as a manager. It's your responsibility as a leader to not self-censor. So cultivate a private space where you don't have to worry about other people seeing what you write down.

If you're looking for a fantastic note-taking tool that does all of the above, give Reflect a try for free.

Want to explore meeting notes more in depth? Watch our YouTube video on the process.