chit at work
A meeting notes template with action items
Most meeting templates have three sections — attendees, discussion, action items — and the discussion section is where notes go to die. This is the structure we use, which has five parts, and the two extra ones are the reason it works.
The template
Copy this. There is no email gate and nothing to sign up for.
- DECISIONS — what was actually settled. Not what was discussed; what is now true. One line each.
- ACTIONS — each with one named owner and a firm date. Not "the team will", not "ASAP".
- PROMISES — what people committed to each other, including what you promised them. This is the section everyone omits.
- OPEN — questions raised and not resolved, so they are visible at the next meeting instead of rediscovered.
- QUOTES — anything worth having in the person's own words: a number, a constraint, a requirement stated precisely.
Why promises get their own section
Almost every template treats commitments as a subset of action items, and they are not the same thing. An action item is a task you assigned yourself. A promise is something another person is now expecting from you, and it carries a relationship rather than a workload.
In practice the promises are what damage things when they are dropped. Nobody resents a slipped internal task; they remember the thing you said you would send. Giving them a separate heading means they get read separately, which is the entire mechanism.
Rules that make it survive contact
One owner per action. Two owners is zero owners, and this is the most reliable failure in any meeting-notes system.
A date, not a horizon. "Next week" is not a date. "Thursday the 14th" is.
Write decisions as statements, not as summaries of the argument. "Quartz, not laminate" beats "discussed countertop options".
If a section is empty, leave the heading with nothing under it. An empty OPEN section is information.
Circulate the same day. A record that arrives on Friday about a Tuesday meeting is archaeology.
Filling it in without typing during the meeting
The reason these templates go unused is that filling one in requires you to be the person not participating. The alternative is to capture and structure afterwards.
This template is not incidental to chit — it is what chit's daily digest produces. Hold the card through the meeting, or say a recap into it afterwards, and the evening digest comes back as what happened, what was decided, and the things that need you next, gathered from everything you captured that day. If you use a different tool, the structure above still works on paper; it was a structure before it was a product.
Good questions
Is there a downloadable version?
The five headings above are the whole template — copy them. We are not going to put them behind an email form.
Why not just use the transcript?
A transcript of a fifty-minute meeting is a wall of text nobody rereads. The template exists because what you needed was the decisions and the promises, which is a page.
Does chit produce this automatically?
The evening digest returns what happened, what was decided and what needs you next, from everything you captured that day. It is the same structure.
What if the meeting had no decisions?
Then the DECISIONS heading stays empty, which is itself worth seeing. A meeting that repeatedly produces nothing under it is telling you something.
Reviewed 2026-08-07.
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