How to write action items from a meeting

An action item is a task someone agreed in a meeting to do after it. It is the part of a meeting that changes anything, and it is also the part that most often gets lost: nobody wrote it down, or it was written as “look into pricing” with no name next to it, and two weeks later everyone assumes someone else did it.

This guide covers how to write action items that get done, when to capture them, and how to follow up without nagging.

The four parts of a good action item

A useful action item has four parts. If one is missing, the task is likely to stall.

1. One owner. A single, named person who is responsible for the task being done. They may get help, but one name goes on the item. “Marketing”, “the team” or “Ari and Sophie” means nobody in particular. If two people genuinely share work, split it into two items.

2. A verb that describes a concrete action. Start with what the person will do: draft, send, book, decide, review, fix, ask. Avoid verbs that describe a state of mind, such as consider, think about, look into or explore. They cannot be finished, so they never are.

3. A due date. An actual date, not “soon”, “next week” or “ASAP”. If the owner cannot commit to a date in the meeting, the action item is “tell the group by Friday when X will be ready”, which at least has a date.

4. A definition of done. How will everyone know the task is finished? “Draft the launch email” could mean a rough outline in a notes app or a final text approved by legal. Say which: “Draft the launch email and share it in the launch channel for review.”

Put together, the pattern is:

[Owner] will [verb] [specific thing] by [date], done when [result].

Good and bad examples

Vague	Clear
Look into pricing.	Sophie compares the three pricing options in a one-page doc and shares it before the 3 Oct meeting.
Security review.	Ari finishes the security review and posts the findings in the project channel by 7 Nov.
Follow up with the client.	Jón emails the client the revised timeline and asks them to confirm by 30 Sep.
Team to fix onboarding bugs.	Guðrún triages the six onboarding bugs and assigns each an owner by Wed 1 Oct.
Think about hiring.	Guðrún decides whether to open a designer role and tells the group at the 10 Oct meeting.

Notice that some clear items are smaller than the vague ones. “Fix onboarding bugs” is a project; “triage and assign the bugs” is a step someone can finish this week. When a task is big, the action item is often just the next step.

What is not an action item

Meetings produce other things that look like tasks but are not, and mixing them into the action list makes it harder to use.

• Decisions. “We launch on 14 November” is a decision. It belongs in the decisions list. The work it causes, such as “Sophie updates the launch plan with the new date by Friday”, is an action item.
• Open questions. “Do we need a French version?” is a question. Turn it into an action item by giving someone the job of answering it: “Jón asks the sales team whether customers need French and reports back by 7 Oct.”
• Ideas and wishes. “It would be nice to redo the website” is a parking-lot item until someone commits to doing something about it.

Capture them during the meeting, not after

It is tempting to write everything up afterwards. The problem is that the details that make an action item useful, the owner and the date, are exactly what people forget or remember differently.

During the meeting:

• Write the item the moment it is agreed, in a shared doc or on the screen if you can, so everyone sees the wording.
• Read it back. “So Ari owns the security review, done by 7 November, and he posts the findings in the channel. Right?” This is the single most effective habit. It catches missing owners, unrealistic dates and misunderstandings while everyone is still in the room.
• Leave five minutes at the end to go through the action list once more. If an item has no owner or no date, sort it out now.

After the meeting:

• Send the list the same day, with the notes, to everyone who attended and anyone who got an action item but was absent.
• Move the items where work is tracked. If your team uses a task tracker, create the tasks there and link them from the notes. Action items that only live in meeting notes tend to be forgotten.
• Check the list against the recording, if the meeting was recorded with everyone’s agreement, when the notes are unclear about who agreed to what.

A simple table in the notes is enough:

## Action items
| Action | Owner | Due | Done when | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finish the security review | Ari | 2026-11-07 | Findings posted in #launch | Open |
| Draft the launch email (EN + IS) | Sophie | 2026-11-10 | Shared for review | Open |

Our meeting notes template includes this table along with decisions, open questions and the rest.

Follow up without nagging

Action items get done when someone looks at them again.

• Start the next meeting with the last meeting’s action items. A quick pass through the list: done, in progress, blocked, or dropped. Knowing the list will be read aloud is often reminder enough.
• Ask about blockers, not effort. “Is anything stopping this?” gets a more useful answer than “Why isn’t this done?”
• Close items explicitly. Mark them done, or drop them on purpose with a note on why. An item that nobody intends to do should not sit on the list making everything else look late.
• Move dates openly. If a due date slips, the owner sets a new one and says so. That is normal; silently missing the date is the problem.
• Keep an eye on overloaded people. If one name owns half the list, that is worth raising before the dates start slipping.

A quick checklist

Before the meeting ends, every action item should pass these checks:

• One named owner, who agreed to it out loud.
• Starts with a concrete verb.
• Has a real date.
• Says what “done” looks like.
• Is small enough to finish by that date, or is the next step of something bigger.
• Is written where the team tracks work.

Where Hearkeeper fits

Hearkeeper is a Mac app that is not released yet. It records your microphone and your computer’s audio on the Mac, in any call app or in the room, with no bot joining. Every recording starts with a consent step, and the recording pill stays visible the whole time.

After the meeting, a local language model drafts the decisions and the to-dos, with who and when, from the transcript. Every line links to the second it was said, so when someone asks “did I really agree to that date?”, you can play the moment instead of arguing about it. It runs on the Mac with no API key, and the list exports to Markdown for your tracker.

If you want action items that point to the moment they were agreed, join the waitlist.