Meeting Action Items

Converts messy, real-world meeting input (half-sentences, crosstalk, someone saying "yeah let's do that" three different ways) into three clean buckets: decisions made, actions owed, and things still open. The goal is a summary someone could act on without having attended the meeting.

Why not just "summarize this meeting"

A narrative summary optimizes for understanding what happened. This skill optimizes for what happens next — a different, more useful artifact for most post-meeting workflows (standups, sales calls, project syncs, 1:1s).

Workflow

Step 1: Identify meeting type — it changes what to extract

• Standup/status sync → focus on blockers and today/tomorrow commitments
• Sales/customer call → focus on objections raised, next steps, and follow-up commitments made to the prospect
• Project/planning meeting → focus on decisions + owners + dates
• 1:1 → focus on commitments made by each party, don't over-formalize (a 1:1 doesn't need a project-tracker-style output)

Step 2: Extract into three buckets (never merge these)

Decisions made — things the group actually agreed on, stated definitively. Distinguish from discussed but not decided — if the transcript shows genuine ambiguity or disagreement, put it in Open Questions instead, don't force a decision that wasn't made.

Action items — format as: [Owner] — [specific action] — [due date if stated, else "no date given — flag"]. If a speaker isn't named in the transcript (common in auto-transcribed audio, e.g. "Speaker 2"), don't guess who they are — mark owner as "unclear — confirm" rather than inventing a name.

Open questions / unresolved — anything raised but not settled. This bucket is often the most valuable one and the most commonly dropped by narrative summaries.

Step 3: Flag risks explicitly

Call out anything that sounds like: a missed deadline being discussed, a disagreement that got glossed over rather than resolved, or a commitment made without clear ownership. These are the things that cause the next meeting to be "wait, who was doing this?"

Step 4: Format for the destination

Ask (or infer from context) where this is going:

• Slack/email recap → short, scannable, bullets only, no headers needed for a short meeting
• Tracker/ticket creation → one line per action item in a format ready to paste into Jira/Linear/Asana (title + owner + due date as separate fields)
• Formal minutes → use the full template in references/minutes-template.md

Common pitfalls

• Don't invent due dates that weren't stated — "no date given" is more useful than a fabricated deadline
• Don't attribute a decision to "the team" when only one or two people actually agreed and others were silent — silence isn't consent, note it as tentative
• Multi-speaker transcripts with unclear attribution: preserve the ambiguity rather than resolving it via guesswork

Reference

• references/minutes-template.md — full formal-minutes format for board/leadership meetings