Meeting notes template

by Atlassian

Set meeting agendas, take notes, and share action items with your team.

KEY FEATURES

Note Taking

Task Planning

Documentation

CATEGORIES

Project Management

Marketing & Sales

Recommended

Page template

We've all left meetings thinking, "There goes X minutes of my life I can't get back." When this happens, it's important to evaluate why the meeting wasn't effective. It may be because the meeting didn't have a clear goal or the necessary meeting participants.

Preventing these issues is crucial for driving action within your company. One way to resolve ineffective meetings is to start using a meeting notes template, a structured document that records progress and meeting highlights.

We've compiled a meeting notes template to help you and your team better prepare for meetings. It includes all the necessary elements for an effective meeting: attendees, agenda, discussion topics, and action items.

Use the free Confluence meeting notes template to prepare for meetings, stay organized, take notes, add action items, and record outcomes.

Why Confluence?
Overview
Benefits
How to

Streamline your meetings with the free meeting notes template in Confluence

Using the Confluence meeting notes template ensures your meetings are productive and organized. This structured document helps capture essential information such as attendees, agenda, discussion topics, and action items, leading to better preparation and follow-up. It also enhances clarity, accountability, and consistency, making it easy for team members to stay informed and on track.

Confluence's integration with other tools and its easy sharing capabilities streamline the process, saving time and helping your team drive results effectively.

What are meeting notes?

Meeting notes are an official record of discussions and actions taken during a meeting. They typically contain the following information:

Meeting date and time
Participants and contact details
Meeting goals
Discussion topics
Action items
Decisions
Next meeting date and time

Meeting notes aren't simply meeting transcripts. They cover essential meeting highlights and summarize what was discussed and accomplished during the meeting.

Meeting notes tips

Use the Confluence meeting notes template to capture notes, track discussions, and document next steps. Some other ways to ensure your meeting notes don't go to waste include:

Promptly sharing meeting notes

Ensure meeting notes are shared with relevant coworkers and team members as soon as possible. Quick distribution can keep the action items relevant and remind people of their responsibilities.

Gathering feedback and confirmation

Depending on the scope and purpose of your meeting, you may want to invite participants to review the meeting notes beforehand. Encourage team members to leave notes or confirm they understand their assignments.

Making multiple meeting notes templates

You can make separate meeting notes templates for different purposes. For example, you may have one meeting notes template for informal meetings and a different template for team meetings. You'll want all your meeting notes templates to have a similar format for consistency.

Use AI tools

Consider using AI tools or virtual meeting assistants to assist with note-taking. Various tools use AI to pull key meeting takeaways and produce action items. Leveraging these tools is an effective way to record your meeting notes without having to designate a note-taker.

Why use a meeting notes template?

There are several benefits to using a meeting notes template. And, no, it's not just another document that your colleagues won't use. An effective meeting notes template can become a useful record-keeping tool. Some of the benefits include:

Enabling consistency

A meeting notes template can provide a clear path to record valuable information from every meeting. The high level of consistency ensures that all essential points are covered.

Providing structure

When someone is in charge of taking meeting notes, a meeting notes template can make it easy for them to understand their task—allowing them to focus on recording the notes instead of figuring out how to organize them.

Ensuring clarity

A well-designed meeting notes template ensures readability, which is crucial for effectively communicating meeting outcomes. Clear meeting notes help people who missed the meeting understand what happened and aid in future employee training.

Driving action

Meeting notes record actions taken and responsibilities assigned. You can use these meeting notes to hold people accountable for action items or review previous meeting notes to measure progress. A meeting notes template has a variety of uses beyond record-keeping. It's a useful tool to catch up on previous meetings, hold team members accountable, and review progress.

How to use the meeting notes template

Step 1. Know the meeting agenda items

Before sending out the invitation, take a moment to craft a meeting agenda. This ensures you have all the necessary elements to make the meeting productive for yourself and your attendees. Be sure to add the agenda items in the meeting notes template to provide structure and clarity ahead of the meeting.

Step 2. Put some prep in your step before the meeting

Include the meeting date, tag participants, and list discussion topics with their respective owners in the table. Similar to how you handle contracts, instruction pages, and any content longer than a tweet, make sure to notify attendees if there are materials requiring mandatory pre-reading. Additionally, add informational links that attendees may find helpful, such as past meeting notes.

Step 3. Share meeting notes right away to save your team time

Once someone is tagged on the meeting notes page, they will be notified in Confluence and via email so they can review your notes. Avoid search-induced headaches by adding the notes page to the meeting invite.

If data is your lifeline, you can view the analytics for your meeting notes page, showing everyone who has viewed it. If someone still has an action item noted on their to-do list, you can send them a friendly notice to review the page before the meeting.

Step 4. Time-box discussion items and designate a note-taker

If you don’t plan on taking notes yourself, assign a team member to take notes during the meeting. Task them with recording key discussions, action items, and any decisions made.

As the meeting organizer, you must ensure discussions stay on track by implementing time-boxes. Don't hesitate to table non-relevant topics for discussion at the next meeting.

Once you've covered everything in your agenda, review key takeaways, decide on the next steps, and apply deadlines to essential action items. You may also decide when the next meeting date should take place.

Step 4. Time-box discussion items and designate a note-taker

Step 5. Organize the way that works for you

Our meeting notes template is easy to use. Simply create a page using the meeting notes template and let Confluence handle the rest. Confluence automatically records and indexes meeting notes in the sidebar for easy access.

Set up a parent page in the page tree and organize meeting pages by dragging and dropping them in any order you like. Inform your attendees about this page so they can use it for future reference.