Write it before you leave the room
Two things evaporate when minutes get written the next morning. The first is why someone objected — a day later only the outcome survives, and the objection reappears in six weeks as if it had never been raised. The second is the line between a decision and "let's try it and see", which everyone remembers differently and always in whichever direction suits them. Both are still intact for about five minutes after the meeting ends, so this form is built to be filled in during those five minutes: agenda items in the order you covered them, half-remembered sentences into the discussion box with a number in front, and only the things that were genuinely settled into the decisions box. Tidying the prose can wait. Sorting decisions from opinions cannot.
How the numbering works
Lines in the agenda box are numbered from the top: first line is item 1. In the discussion and decision boxes, put that number in front and the note attaches to that item — 1|Phase one covers the entry only. A period works instead of the pipe, so 1. Phase one covers the entry only reads the same. Lines with no number are not discarded; they collect under "notes with no agenda number", which is where the tangents and the things somebody raised at the end end up. Do not delete that section before circulating. It is usually most of next meeting's agenda already written.
Making the gaps visible
Action items go in as owner | task | due. Leave the owner out and the table prints "unassigned"; leave the date out, or write TBD, TBC, a dash or a question mark, and it prints "no date". The count of items missing one or the other sits at the top of the results, because those are the items that fail silently. An action with no owner is not done by the next meeting roughly always, and one with no date loses every collision with something that has one. Check that number before you circulate and fill in what you can.
Dates are read as MM/DD/YYYY. Anything that is not a real calendar date is left exactly as you typed it and flagged rather than silently corrected — 02/30/2026 is not a date, and turning it into March 2 without telling you is the kind of helpfulness that produces a missed deadline. Free text like "end of week" or "after the site visit" passes straight through; only things that look like dates get checked.
Two forms of the same record
The text copy is for pasting into chat or an email body: discussion lines lead with a dash, decisions with an equals sign, so the two are distinguishable when scanning. The print document is a bordered letter-size record with the header block, an agenda-by-agenda breakdown and a numbered action table, and the same button saves it as a PDF from the print dialog.
One thing worth being plain about, because minutes are exactly the kind of document where it matters: nothing you type on this page is uploaded. There is no server call, no analytics on the field contents, no draft saved anywhere. Names, internal decisions, a client's budget, whatever ends up in the discussion box — it is processed by JavaScript in your own browser and disappears on refresh. That also means it is not backed up, so if the minutes matter, take the printout or the text copy before you close the tab.
Questions people ask
What happens to discussion notes I forget to number?
They are kept, not dropped, and appear together under "notes with no agenda number". You can dump anything into the box during the meeting and sort it out afterwards — add a number and run it again and the line moves under that agenda item.
Can a due date be "end of the month" instead of a date?
Yes. Text is passed through as written. Anything shaped like a date is checked and normalised to MM/DD/YYYY, and impossible dates are flagged rather than rolled over. Blank, TBD, TBC, a dash or a question mark all count as no date and are included in the missing count at the top.
Are the minutes stored anywhere?
No. Every part of this runs in your browser and a refresh clears it. That is deliberate for a document that often contains internal information, but it also means nothing is recoverable — take the print or the text copy before you leave the page.