How to keep meeting notes and decisions you can still find a month later

Every meeting ends with a decision. A month later, someone asks what it was, and the search begins: a notebook on someone's desk, a document called notes final 2, a chat thread, an email nobody can find. In the end the team decides the same thing again, or worse, something different.

The problem is rarely the note-taking. It's where the notes end up. Here is a simple way to keep meeting notes in Notes so that the decisions in them can be found again, by you, by your team and by your AI assistant.

Start every meeting from the same template

A new, empty note offers its templates above the text, under Start from a template:. Pick Meeting minutes and you get a note with today's date in the title and a place for everything: Attendees, Agenda, Notes, Decisions and Next steps, the last one as a checklist.

The shape matters more than it seems. When every set of minutes has a Decisions heading, you always know where to look, and so does a search.

Notes also comes with Project brief, Retrospective and Journal, and if your meetings follow their own shape, write a note the way you want it and choose Save as template. Templates are part of Pro. On Free, the same five headings typed by hand, or written by your assistant, do the same job.

Give each kind of meeting its notebook

Take a weekly call with a client, say Harbour & Co. Make a notebook called Harbour & Co and keep every week's minutes in it, one note per call. Put that notebook, with the ones for your other clients, in a group called Clients; your internal meetings can have a group of their own.

Two more habits help:

• Tags for what cuts across notebooks, such as supplier or budget. Your tags are private: nobody you share a notebook with sees them.
• Pin the note you come back to most, such as the running list of open questions for Harbour & Co. It stays at the top of its notebook and in the Pinned view.

Keep a daily note as your work log

Not everything happens in a meeting. A phone call in the corridor, a quick "yes, go with the cheaper boxes" from your manager: those are decisions too.

Today opens the daily note, created by itself with the date, in your Inbox. Jot down what happened as it happens, one line each. Each daily note also shows up on the day in Cronum Work's calendar, so "what did I do last Tuesday?" is a click away. There's more about that in one calendar for everything with a date.

Find it again with search

Search looks through the whole text of every note. It doesn't care about accents, and it finds words by their start, so pack finds packaging and packed. What it found is highlighted in the note.

When you have hundreds of notes, narrow it down with filters, alone or with words:

packaging notebook:Harbour
tag:supplier is:pinned
decided group:Clients

It works offline too, on the notes already on your device.

Let your AI write the minutes and answer the questions

If you've connected your AI assistant to Cronum Work, you can leave the filing to it. Paste a transcript or your rough notes and say where they go:

Write up the minutes of today's Harbour & Co call from these notes, in the Harbour & Co notebook, with the attendees, the decisions and the next steps.

Add to today's note that we chose Northfield for the packaging: Brightbox couldn't deliver before March.

A month later, nobody has to remember which call it was:

What did we decide about the packaging supplier?

The assistant searches Notes, reads the minutes, and answers with the decision and the note it comes from, such as "Northfield, agreed on 3 November, in Harbour & Co: Week 45". You can open that note and check it yourself.

The assistant adds to a note without rewriting it, and if the note changed since it read it, it doesn't overwrite anything.

Turn next steps into tasks

The minutes end with a checklist of next steps. A next step that only lives in the minutes tends to stay there. Put the cursor on a checklist line and choose Send this line to Tasks: it becomes a task in Tasks that keeps a link back to the note, so whoever does it can see why. Your assistant can turn them into linked tasks too. More on how the modules connect in link tasks, notes, projects and steps.

Never lose what was written

Minutes get edited: someone fixes a figure, someone else "tidies up". Earlier versions shows the versions of the note with who changed it and when (how long they are kept depends on your plan). Mark the changes shows what changed word by word, added in green and removed struck through.

If an edit went wrong, choose Bring this one back. The text it replaces isn't lost: it's kept as a version too. And if someone changed the note while you were writing, your text is saved apart, so nothing is overwritten without warning.

Share the notebook, not a copy

Rather than emailing the minutes after every call, share the notebook. Choose Share…, type the person's email and decide whether they Can edit or get it Read only. They always see the latest minutes, and you stop sending attachments. Share a group and they also get the notebooks you add to it later.

A checklist to start

1. One notebook per client or recurring meeting, in groups.
2. Every meeting from the Meeting minutes template, decisions under Decisions.
3. The daily note for the decisions made in between.
4. Next steps sent to Tasks, not left in the note.
5. A connected assistant to write the minutes and answer "what did we decide?".

See everything Notes does on its page.