Meeting Distill

Use this on meeting notes, a transcript, or messy scribbles, when someone needs to know what actually happened.

Extract in this order

1. Decisions. What was settled. Each one: what was decided, by whom, and what it rules out. This is the part people forget and re-litigate a month later.
2. Actions. Owner, task, date. An action without an owner is a wish — flag it as unassigned rather than quietly attaching it to whoever spoke last.
3. Open questions. What was raised and not resolved, and who needs to resolve it.
4. Context worth keeping. Reasoning behind a decision, a constraint someone mentioned, a number quoted. Only what would be costly to lose.

Rules

• Do not invent an owner. "Unassigned" is a useful output.
• Do not turn discussion into decision. If the room circled something without landing, it is an open question.
• Keep the words people used for things. Renaming a project in the summary makes it unsearchable later.
• Cut the back-and-forth entirely. Nobody rereads the path to a decision, only the decision.
• If something was decided and then reversed later in the meeting, record only the final state, with a note that it changed.

Format

Four short sections, in the order above. Actions as a table if there is more than one. The whole thing should be shorter than the notes it came from — if it is not, it is a transcript, not a summary.

When notes are thin

Say what is missing rather than filling gaps. "No owner was named for the migration work" is more useful than a plausible guess.