From a meeting recording to usable notes in ten minutes
A transcript is raw material, not a document. This is the shortest path from a two-hour recording to something a colleague will actually read.
Start from the structure, not the text
Do not read the transcript from top to bottom. Open it and look for the moments where the conversation turns: a new speaker holding the floor for a while, a question that changes the subject, a long pause. Those are your section breaks. Five or six of them cover a two-hour meeting.
Pull decisions before summaries
A meeting produces three kinds of content worth keeping: decisions, commitments and open questions. Everything else is context.
Search the transcript for the phrasing your team actually uses — "let's go with", "I'll take", "we still don't know" — and lift those lines verbatim. Verbatim matters: a paraphrased commitment is exactly the kind of thing people dispute three weeks later.
Write for the person who was not there
Attach a name and a date to every commitment. Replace pronouns with names — "he said he'd handle it" is useless by the end of the month. Keep the summary under a page; if it runs longer, link to the timestamped transcript instead of copying more of it out.
Keep the recording
Notes compress; recordings do not. Keeping the transcript searchable means a disagreement six months from now takes one search rather than an argument. Export the transcript alongside the notes and store the two together.
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