Meeting minutes template, by meeting type

Copy this. It is the frame every template further down this page varies, and on its own it is enough for most meetings.

Two habits make the difference between a record and a transcript. Write the discussion for the person who was not there, which means the reasoning rather than the exchange. And put a name in every owner column before the meeting ends, because an action with no owner is a note about something that will not happen.

Formats differ, and the differences matter less than people writing them expect. Whatever the layout, a record that omits any of these four is not a record of a meeting, it is a summary of a conversation.

Everything else is convention. Formal minutes for a governed body add a call to order, motions with movers and seconders, and votes; working minutes for a team drop all of that and add owner columns. Neither is more correct than the other, they are answering to different readers.

The agenda is a separate craft from the record, and a good one is what makes a short record possible: topics phrased as questions, a type per item, and time allocated rather than assumed. Meeting overload covers how to write one, and how to work out whether the meeting should exist at all.

Four steps, and the order is what keeps it under ten minutes.

1. Fill in the frame before the meeting. Name, date, purpose, expected attendees. A blank page at the end of a meeting is what makes the write-up feel like a task rather than a tidy-up.
2. Capture decisions as they land, not at the end. One line, in the moment. The reconstruction at the end is where accuracy goes, because by then the room has moved on twice.
3. Read the actions out loud before closing. Thirty seconds, and it is the only reliable way to find out that the thing everyone agreed on has no owner.
4. Circulate the same day, to the people who were not there. A record written for the absent gets read; a record written for the archive does not, and it stops being written within a month.

Step two is where this breaks, and it breaks for a structural reason rather than a lack of discipline: the person best placed to write the record is usually the person chairing, and chairing well and typing accurately cannot be done at once. That is what the second half of this page is about.

Eight pages, one per meeting type, each with its own template, the failure mode particular to it, and a preset that writes it. They are the meetings a working week is made of, which is not the same list as the ones with the most search traffic.

• One-on-one meeting agenda template: The recurring conversation whose value is the thread across months, plus the boundary block that keeps part of it out of the file. Performance reviews are on this page too.
• Team meeting agenda template: The weekly where the small cross-cutting decisions happen, with an unowned bucket for the blocker everybody nodded at.
• Staff meeting agenda template: The one you attend rather than run, where escalations get a status and you record what you committed to upward.
• Project kickoff meeting agenda template: The meeting with the longest half-life, and the out-of-scope list that is the only part anyone argues about later.
• Agile ceremony templates: Five templates on one page: daily scrum, sprint planning, sprint review, retrospective and backlog refinement.
• Strategic planning meeting agenda template: Planning, OKR setting and offsites, with the rejected-options table that makes a later reversal a decision rather than a drift.
• Project status meeting agenda template: Status and steering, with a date-change log and approvals recorded in the words the approver used.
• All-hands meeting agenda template: All-hands and town halls, where the Q&A is the half worth keeping and the owed answers need names and dates.

These get a section here rather than a page, because a page needs a reader arriving at it and nobody searches for these. The frame at the top plus one adjustment covers each.

Stakeholder review, sync, demo and readout

Use the frame at the top with one addition: a column recording what each stakeholder asked for, attributed, because the point of the meeting is that several people want different things and the record has to survive all of them. What was shown matters less than what was requested and by whom.

Design review and critique

The frame, with the discussion section organised by the thing being reviewed rather than by speaker, and a decisions table that records which direction was chosen and why. Record the reasoning and the same alternative stops being proposed again next month.

Discovery and customer interview

The frame, with the discussion kept as close to the customer's own words as you can manage. Everything else in this pillar is improved by summarising and this is the one case where it is not: the phrase the customer used is the finding, and your paraphrase of it is an interpretation you cannot check later.

Postmortem and incident review

The frame with a timeline block before Discussion, and the timeline is the whole document. Record what was known at each point rather than what was true, since the gap between the two is what the review exists to find. Keep it blameless in the record as well as in the room.

Roadmap review

The frame plus a sequence table, and one addition: what moved, and what it moved past. A review that records only the new order loses the trade-off, and the trade-off is what gets questioned afterwards.

Performance reviews are on the one-on-one page rather than here, because a review is structurally a 1:1: the same carried-over block, the same boundary about what stays out of the file, and a content that is drawn almost entirely from a year of the ordinary ones. Skip-levels are the opposite case, and they get neither a template nor a section. The meeting works because the substance travels and the source does not, which a verbatim record destroys, so skip-level meetings makes the case for keeping no record of one and this pillar defers to it.

Usability sessions and user interviews get neither, and the reason is not that the meetings are rare. Across 2,222 template searches in this category there are zero for either. The people who run them already have a script, a note-taking protocol and a synthesis method, and a generic minutes template would be a downgrade. What they need from a record is verbatim accuracy and a timestamp, not a decisions table.

What defeats people is filling the template in twenty minutes after the meeting, while the next one is starting.

The failure has a predictable shape. Notes get written for the first three meetings of a recurring series and then they stop, and the series that most needs a record is the one that has been running longest, which is precisely the one whose notes ran out in March. The cause is not that anyone stopped caring. The writing is a second job that arrives at the moment the first one resumes, and no calendar makes room for it.

This half is a product feature. Exactly what it does, in four steps:

1. The day is already recorded. Earkeep captures your microphone and your system audio continuously and transcribes on your device, and the audio is never written to disk at all. There is no start button and no bot joining the call. Always-on capture covers why, and private by design covers where the audio goes, which is nowhere.
2. You mark the meeting once it is over. Select the range on the timeline and save it as a meeting. A recurring meeting on a connected calendar names and bounds its own span, so a week of them accumulates without anyone maintaining anything. Calendar connection has the detail.
3. You pick a saved template in the composer. Settings → Templates holds instruction presets, each with a name, an agent, a working directory and the prompt text. Opening the agent panel on a saved meeting offers them, and the meeting and its transcript are attached to the prompt for you, as resources, so the preset itself is just the instruction.
4. The agent writes the file. It runs on your machine, as your own CLI, with your own key, in the directory the preset names. Agents and MCP explains how that works.

The "one click" is picking the preset. Nothing fires a template because a meeting's title matched a pattern; Earkeep has no such matching.

The preset for this page, with ~/notes/meetings as the directory:

That is the general-purpose preset, and it is close to the default instruction Earkeep ships. The eight pages below each give a preset that varies it, because the rows a kickoff needs are not the rows a retro needs.

Earkeep has no scheduler. There is no nightly job to switch on, no "run this agent every week" setting, and there is not one hidden in a menu either. What it has instead is a directory of plain markdown files and a read-only MCP server on loopback, which is everything a scheduler you already own needs.

The pattern on top of that is a compiled wiki: raw sources stay immutable, an agent writes one page per concept from them, and a schema file states the rules. The LLM Wiki is the pattern and from what was said to what you know is the pipeline a meeting travels along it. For a mixed folder of meetings the destination is a single decision register: one dated row per decision, with a link to the meeting it came from. It is the least sophisticated thing you can build on this and the one people actually use.

Keep the ingest instructions in a file so a scheduled run and a manual one read the same one. ~/wiki/INGEST.md:

Then the schedule, which is yours. On macOS a LaunchAgent is the supported mechanism and it survives the laptop being asleep at the appointed minute, where a cron job simply misses it. Save this as ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.yourname.wiki-ingest.plist:

Load it once with launchctl bootstrap gui/$(id -u) and the path to that file. Or, if you already keep a crontab, one line instead:

Two things bite about that line. Cron runs with a minimal PATH, so the agent binary needs its absolute path or the job fails silently. And on current macOS a cron job that reads directories under ~/Documents or ~/Desktop needs Full Disk Access granted to /usr/sbin/cron in System Settings.

The join between a meeting and its write-up is the filename convention you chose, and nothing else: there is no field on a saved meeting recording where its notes landed. A quarter in, the decision register answers the question that no single meeting record can, which is when a thing was decided and what was known at the time.

• No speaker labels. There is no diarisation, so nothing in the transcript says who said which sentence, and the minutes cannot attribute a line to a person from the audio. Attribution comes from what was said out loud ("Sam will take the migration"), from a connected calendar's attendee list, or from you typing the names. The **Present:** line is a line you fill in.
• macOS only. macOS 13 or later. The Windows audio path is designed and not released, and the scheduling half of this page is macOS-specific by construction.
• The agent is yours. It runs as your own CLI with your own key. Earkeep does not resell model access and there is no per-meeting AI fee, which is what makes it €39 once. What the agent does with the context after Earkeep hands it over is a property of the agent you chose, not of Earkeep. Setting up Claude Code covers installing and signing in to one of them.
• Nothing writes back. The MCP server is read-only, with exactly two tools, so a scheduled agent can read your meetings and cannot create or edit a meeting, a note or a file through it. The wiki is a one-way derivative of the record.

• Standup and retrospective formats: how to facilitate the two most-run meetings on this page, as opposed to how to record them.
• Local RAG in practice: what to do when a year of write-ups outgrows grep, and where grep still wins.
• Pricing: €39 once, for one device, with a 14-day trial that needs no email.
• All Earkeep how-tos.