Meeting Minutes Preparation Checklist

Ask who is taking the minutes at each meeting and whether their record is intended to serve as the record everybody works from.

Where nobody has been asked, everybody assumes somebody is doing it, and the meeting produces no record at all.

Keep your own note even where somebody else is minuting, since your note is what allows you to check theirs rather than simply accept it.

Minutes written by a party with an interest in the outcome are not dishonest, but they are written from one point of view.

Ask what standing the minutes are intended to have and whether anything recorded in them counts as an instruction.

What weight minutes carry depends on your arrangement; put that question to your own legal adviser before treating any of them as binding.

Agree a consistent format and stick to it, so that a meeting recorded now can be read alongside one recorded much earlier in the project.

Minutes that change shape from meeting to meeting cannot be scanned for a subject, which is how they are almost always used.

Record who attended, who was expected and did not come, and who arrived or left partway through the meeting.

Whether somebody was in the room when a matter was discussed is the first thing questioned when the matter comes back.

Start the agenda from the actions still open at the last meeting rather than from new subjects, so nothing carries over invisibly.

New subjects always feel more pressing, which is exactly why unfinished items drift from one meeting to the next unnoticed.

Add any decision you know is holding work up, and say plainly on the agenda whose decision it is understood to be.

Naming the owner of a stuck decision on the agenda resolves a surprising number of them before the meeting even happens.

Circulate the agenda before the meeting so that people can bring the information they need rather than promising to look it up afterwards.

Most actions arising from meetings are things somebody could have answered in the room had they known the question was coming.

Flag items that cannot be dealt with unless a particular person is present, and check that they are coming before the meeting goes ahead.

An item discussed in the absence of the person who knows about it produces a decision that has to be revisited.

Say on the agenda which drawings, schedules and issues will be needed, so everybody arrives holding the same version of them.

Meetings conducted across differing issues of the same sheet produce agreement about two different things.

Keep a standing item for anything found in the building since the last meeting, so discoveries are reported rather than mentioned in passing.

What a discovery in the building means must be assessed by qualified professionals; the agenda item is for reporting it, not for settling it.

Capture the actual wording of anything that sounds like a decision, rather than your summary of it, and mark it so you can find it later.

Summaries written in the room are already an interpretation, and by the evening the original wording is gone.

Note who said each significant thing, since a statement made by a particular party carries a weight that an anonymous note does not.

It matters a great deal later whether an assurance came from the professional responsible for that work or from somebody else in the room.

Mark the points where you did not follow what was being said, rather than tidying them into a note that reads as though you understood.

The passages an owner did not follow are the ones most worth going back to, and they vanish if written up smoothly.

Where figures or references are quoted, record them exactly as given along with who gave them, and treat them as reported rather than established.

Figures quoted in a meeting are not confirmed values; ask the responsible professional to put anything you will rely on in writing.

Avoid writing your own conclusion into the note during the meeting, since a conclusion recorded in the moment tends to survive the discussion around it.

Notes are read later as fact, and an owner conclusion sitting among other people's statements is easily mistaken for one of them.

Put decisions in their own clearly marked part of the record rather than embedding them in a narrative of the conversation.

Decisions buried inside a paragraph of discussion are missed by everybody who was not in the room.

For each decision, say what it changes from and what document it affects, rather than recording only the new position.

A decision recorded without its starting point cannot be recognised later as the moment something changed.

Record opinions and preferences expressed in the meeting as views held, attributed to the person who held them, not as outcomes.

Strong views voiced in a room become remembered as agreements unless the record is explicit that nothing was settled.

Ask in the room whether something has just been decided when you are unsure, and record the answer you were given.

The question is slightly awkward to ask and saves an enormous amount of trouble, because people answer it honestly at the time.

Note where a decision was taken by somebody else and simply reported to you, so the record shows who actually made it.

Decisions that rest with a qualified professional remain theirs; a minute recording one does not transfer it to the owner.

Flag any decision that appears to alter the agreed work, and ask in the meeting how it will be recorded outside the minutes.

A minute cannot turn a discussion into a change; ask the appointed professionals how any alteration to the agreed work is properly recorded.

Name an individual against every action rather than a company or a trade, since organisations do not chase themselves.

Actions assigned to a firm sit unclaimed, and each person in that firm reasonably assumes a colleague picked it up.

Write what the person is actually to do and what will exist when it is done, rather than recording the subject the action relates to.

Actions phrased as topics cannot be closed, because nobody can tell whether anything has yet been produced.

Tie each action to a point in the work rather than leaving it open, such as before a particular trade arrives or before an order is placed.

An action with no moment attached is never late, so it is never chased and never done.

Mark your own actions distinctly so that the things waiting on you are visible at a glance rather than mixed into everybody's list.

Owner actions stall longest because nobody else is chasing them, and the owner often does not realise they now hold them.

Where an action cannot start until somebody else has done something, record that dependency next to it rather than leaving it implied.

Chains of dependent actions look like a list of separate items, and the blockage at the front is invisible.

List the items that were discussed and left unresolved, rather than allowing them to disappear because no decision was reached.

An unresolved item with no entry looks identical to an item nobody raised, which is how subjects get quietly dropped.

Say what each open item is waiting for, whether that is information, a drawing, an inspection by somebody or a decision from you.

Open items with a stated dependency get resolved; open items described only as ongoing do not.

Record questions raised in the meeting that nobody present could answer, together with who undertook to find out.

Unanswerable questions are the ones most likely to be forgotten, because the discussion moves on quickly.

Note where something was deliberately parked until a later stage, and record the reason, so it is not reopened repeatedly.

Parked items come back at every meeting unless the record shows they were parked on purpose and why.

Where the meeting ended in disagreement, record that plainly and record each position, rather than writing a form of words that hides it.

Do not attempt to resolve a technical disagreement in the minutes; record the positions and refer the matter to the appropriate professional.

Circulate the record promptly while everybody still remembers the meeting, rather than shortly before the next one.

Corrections offered against a stale record are guesses, and most people simply stop bothering to send them.

Say explicitly that corrections are invited and how they should be sent, rather than issuing the record as though it were settled.

People who disagree with a minute usually say nothing unless asked directly, and then raise it much later when it matters.

Send the record to everybody affected by it, including people who did not attend but who hold an action arising from it.

Actions assigned to absent people are the ones most reliably not done, because nobody told them.

Where a correction is accepted, record it as a correction with its date rather than silently amending the original text.

Quietly edited minutes destroy confidence in the whole set, because nobody can tell what the record said originally.

Keep the version as issued alongside any corrected version, so a reader can see exactly which points were later put right.

The corrected point is often exactly the point that turns out to matter, and only both versions show what changed.

Read minutes written by another party against your own note, and raise anything recorded as agreed that you did not understand to be agreed.

Do not let an inaccurate minute stand uncorrected; raise it in writing with the party who issued it as soon as you notice.

Keep one running list of actions across all meetings rather than a fresh list each time, so nothing disappears when a meeting is skipped.

Fresh lists lose whatever was not copied across, and the items lost are always the awkward ones.

Keep the original reference of an item as it carries forward, so its full history can be followed rather than restarting at each meeting.

An item renumbered each meeting appears new every time, which hides how long it has actually been outstanding.

Show against each carried item when it first arose, so items that have been open a long while stand out from recent ones.

Age is the most useful single piece of information about an open item, and it is the first thing lost when lists are rewritten.

Close an item explicitly with a note of what closed it, rather than dropping it from the list because nobody mentioned it again.

Items that vanish silently come back, and nobody can then establish whether they were dealt with or forgotten.

Raise any item that has been carried through several meetings as a subject in its own right, rather than reading past it again.

Items that survive several meetings are usually blocked by something nobody has named out loud.