Meeting minutes

10-19 Concepts 14 Build your system
1

Working as COO at a 100 MUSD company and are in the planning stage of setting up my index that will be a company wide index spreading across several departments that I work towards/with.

I have a couple of questions.

  • What is the best way to organize meeting minutes? Is it better to have a category “Minutes” with IDs for each type of meeting (e.g. board meetings, finance, marketing etc) or is it better to have separate minutes ID below each category that the meeting adheres to?

  • What is the best way to store meeting minutes? I see three options. 1. have them directly in the index in the notes app I choose. 2. keep them in a separate app only dedicated to minutes or 3. Have text docs stored in the filing system.

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2

I think both depend on the use-case:

  • Where would somebody search? Does everybody read all the minutes or does everybody attend all? Than a category would be nice. If only finance needs the finance minutes, then an ID within the finance area/category would work I think.
    Look at the way your company works and who needs access.
  • Same goed for storing. How do you take notes during meetings? That would be the way to save them. Keeping the index of the JD-system would give you the directions to these minutes wherever they are stored.

Bottom line:

You are not here to serve your JD-system, you JD-system is here to serve you and the way you work.

3

Good advice, and I’ve done both.

I’ve had a category 12 Minutes (within the broader and ubiquitous 10-19 Administration) and that had one ID per meeting. It’s so long ago now I don’t remember the details but something like:

  • 12.01 Weekly project status report
  • 12.02 Monthly financial review
  • 12.03 Weekly resource forecasting

I’ve always been a fan of one note for the meeting, and I use Markdown headers with a date/time stamp to mark each new session. That way they’re all just there. But these were only ever for me, not for distribution; that might change the equation.

General advice though: start simple and if you need to get more complex, get more complex. So I’d start with the same app you keep your index in. It works.

I’ve also kept minutes in the category that they relate to. These days I would tend to advise this approach. ‘Minutes’ or ‘meetings’ aren’t a special thing. They’re just one of the things that you do in relation to a category. So keep them with that category unless there’s a reason not to.

This is why I generally start my IDs at .11, in the same way that I don’t use 00-09. It leaves .00-09 for special things that I know every category might need: like meeting minutes.[1]

So you might end up with:

13 Project status reporting
   13.03 Weekly report minutes
…
15 Financial
   15.03 Monthly review minutes
…
18 Resource
   18.03 Weekly review minutes

And you know to use .03 (or whatever) for any minutes anywhere.

  1. Something else for me to document as an ‘advanced concept’ one day. ↩︎

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4

Thank you both!

I like the Idea with having a standardized id-numbers for the first IDs below each category incl minutes. I think I will try going with that approach and keep all minutes in my notes app and then share the ones to be shared via email or teams post.

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