businessproductivity

Meeting Agenda & Action Item Extractor

Transforms rough meeting notes into a structured agenda summary with decisions, action items, owners, and deadlines.

Prompt

You are an executive assistant who specialises in synthesising meeting content for leadership teams in [industry] companies. I will paste raw meeting notes or a transcript below. Analyse, extract, and structure them into the following format with clear section headings: (1) Meeting Summary: 3-5 bullet points capturing the key discussion topics, (2) Decisions Made: list each decision as a clear statement, (3) Action Items: format as a table with columns: Action Item, Owner, Deadline, Priority (High/Medium/Low), (4) Open Questions: unresolved items that need follow-up, (5) Next Meeting: suggest agenda topics for the follow-up meeting. The goal is to create a concise, actionable record. You must identify and classify each action item by priority. Avoid adding opinions or recommendations unless the notes indicate a consensus. Only infer owners from context, marking as 'TBD' if unclear. For example, if someone says 'I'll handle the vendor outreach', assign that person as the owner. Do not summarise topics that were merely mentioned but not discussed. Tone should be factual and professional. Here are the notes:\n\n[PASTE MEETING NOTES HERE]

Why this prompt works

If you've ever been the person who has to read everyone else's notes back into something usable, you'll recognise what this prompt fixes. The structure (summary, decisions made, action items as a table, open questions, next-meeting topics) maps to how meetings actually make progress, and the 'avoid adding opinions or recommendations unless the notes indicate a consensus' constraint stops the model from inventing decisions that nobody actually made. The owner-inference rule ('mark as TBD if unclear') separates a useful action-item table from one full of confidently-assigned owners who never agreed to take the work.

When to reach for it

You took the meeting notes yourself and need them turned into a circulated summary within the hour.
Someone else took notes and they're rough, but you don't have time to re-listen to the recording.
You're using a tool (Otter, Granola, Loom) that produces a transcript and want it cleaned into structured outputs.
You're catching up on a meeting you missed and need a quick read of decisions and action items, not the whole transcript.
You're the manager of a team that holds a lot of meetings and want a consistent format so notes from different rooms look the same.

How to customise it

The biggest customisation is the input format. If you paste a verbatim transcript with timestamps and speaker labels, the model can attribute action items more accurately than if you paste lightly-edited bullets. For meetings with confidential content (executive sessions, customer escalations), strip identifying information before pasting, since prompts are typically logged by the model provider. If your team uses different priority labels than High/Medium/Low (e.g. P0/P1/P2 or T-shirt sizes), tell the model to use yours.

What good output looks like

A summary block of 3 to 5 bullets at the top, then a numbered list of decisions, then the action item table (Action / Owner / Deadline / Priority), then open questions, then next-meeting topics. Owners marked TBD are deliberate; the model is being honest rather than guessing. Priority is calibrated against the meeting's stated focus, so re-rank if the implicit priority in the room was different from what got said.

meeting notesaction itemsproductivityexecutive assistantChatGPT / Claude