A 60-minute meeting where "we sort of decided something" is worse than no meeting — nobody remembers the same thing by Thursday. This takes a raw transcript and turns it into a one-page decision memo in Google Docs: what was decided, why, who owns what, and what's still open. The artifact is the point.
Who this is for
Anyone who runs or attends meetings that produce decisions but not records — strategy syncs, planning, anything where "wait, what did we agree?" shows up later.
What you'll need
- A transcript or solid notes (Google Meet/Zoom auto-transcripts are fine, even messy).
- Claude and a Google Doc to drop the memo into.
Get the raw record · 5 min
Grab the auto-transcript, or your bullet notes if that's all you have. Don't clean it up — Claude handles the cross-talk and the tangents.
Extract the decisions · 10 min
Paste it in with this:
Below is a raw meeting transcript. Turn it into a one-page decision memo with these sections: - CONTEXT — 2 sentences on why we met. - DECISIONS — each as "We will [X] because [Y]." Only include things actually decided, not discussed. - ACTION ITEMS — owner, task, and due date. If an owner or date wasn't named, write "UNASSIGNED" so I can chase it. - OPEN QUESTIONS — what we explicitly did NOT resolve. - PARKING LOT — good tangents worth revisiting later. Be skeptical: if something sounds like a decision but nobody committed, put it under OPEN QUESTIONS instead. Keep it to one page. Transcript: [paste]
Fix the gaps and send · 10 min
The UNASSIGNED tags are your to-do list — fill in owners and dates from memory. Read the DECISIONS section as if you were the person who missed the meeting; if anything's ambiguous, tighten it. Drop it in the Doc, share, and post the link where the team will see it.
Treating discussion as decision. The most common failure mode. If nobody said "yes, we're doing this," it's an open question — label it honestly or you'll relitigate it.
Leaving owners blank. An action item with no name is a wish. Resolve every UNASSIGNED before you send.
Burying the memo in chat. Put it somewhere durable and linkable. A memo nobody can find didn't fix the problem.
Do this next
- Send it within an hour while memories are fresh enough to correct it.
- Make it the meeting's default output. Once people expect a memo, the meetings themselves get crisper.
- Pull action items into your tracker so they don't live only in the doc.