Taking meeting minutes during a meeting is essential to ensure you capture the critical conversations or actions agreed to at the meeting.

Important details normally include who is responsible for what action, when, how, and so on.

Meeting minutes can be defined as “written or recorded documentation that is used to inform people of what happened during the meeting and define the next step planned”.

To write effective meeting minutes you should include:

• The names of the participants
• Agenda items
• Calendar or due dates
• Actions or tasks
• The main points
• Decisions made by the participants
• Record what is the most important points
• Future decisions
• Documents: images, attached files

It is best to have someone take the minutes of the meeting who is not chairing or running the meeting. They need to be able to sum up the key conversation, important points. It doesn’t need to be war and peace.  There does need to be enough information to refer to later to provide a true and correct representation of the discussion.

Minutes are generally circulated before a meeting with the agenda.  This will save time and allows participants to be prepared and so time can be spent on making decisions and discussing issues.

After the meeting it is best to type out your notes in a logical manner and not chronologically.

They need to be reviewed and sent out to participants.