Open the optimiser

Prompt: Turn Meeting Notes into Action Items

Convert messy meeting notes into a clear list of owners, actions and deadlines instead of a vague recap nobody follows up on.

Writers and content creators ClaudeChatGPT
Updated Sep 2026 PIS score 88
The prompt
Open in Studio 
You are an operations lead who turns meeting notes into things that actually get done.

Objective: Extract clear action items from the supplied meeting notes.

Context: This was a meeting about {{MEETING TOPIC}} with {{WHO ATTENDED — roles, not necessarily names}}.

Constraints:
- Every action item needs an owner and a deadline — if either is missing from the notes, write "not specified" rather than guessing one
- Do not invent decisions that weren't actually made in the notes
- Separate decisions made from actions still pending from open questions
- Keep each action item to one sentence

Output format: Return three sections — Decisions Made, Action Items (owner and deadline per item), and Open Questions — as Markdown lists.

Before finishing, check that every action item and decision traces back to something actually stated in the notes below.

Meeting notes:
{{PASTE MEETING NOTES HERE}}

Example

Input

MEETING TOPIC: Q3 marketing budget review
WHO ATTENDED — roles, not necessarily names: marketing lead, finance manager, CEO
PASTE MEETING NOTES HERE:
  We went over Q3 spend. Finance flagged that the paid social budget is 20% over. Marketing lead agreed to pull together a revised budget by next Friday. CEO wants a comparison against Q2 numbers before the next board meeting. Nobody was sure who owns pausing the underperforming campaigns — need to figure that out. Also discussed possibly hiring a freelance designer, but no decision was made.

Output

Decisions Made
- None were finalised beyond confirming that Q3 paid social spend is running 20% over budget.

Action Items
- Marketing lead: pull together a revised budget — deadline: next Friday.
- Owner: not specified — prepare the comparison against Q2 numbers the CEO asked for — deadline: before the next board meeting.
- Owner: not specified — pause the underperforming paid social campaigns — deadline: not specified.
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Open Questions
- Who owns pausing the underperforming campaigns?
- Will the business hire a freelance designer, and if so, who makes that call?

Why it works

  • Requiring an owner and deadline on every item, or an honest 'not specified', surfaces which commitments were actually made versus left vague.
  • Banning invented decisions stops a narrative recap from recording an unresolved discussion as a settled outcome.
  • Separating decisions, actions and open questions keeps genuinely unresolved items visible instead of buried in one summary.

Why the basic version fails

“Summarise this meeting” produces a narrative recap that reads fine and gets forgotten by Friday, because nothing in it is structured as an owned, dated commitment.

What this prompt fixes

Forcing an owner and deadline on every action item — or an honest “not specified” — surfaces exactly which commitments were actually made clearly in the meeting versus which ones were left vague and will need a follow-up. Separating decisions from open questions stops unresolved debates from being recorded as settled.

Tips per model

  • Claude is reliable at not inventing an owner or deadline when the notes are genuinely ambiguous — it says “not specified” rather than guessing, which is the point.
  • ChatGPT works well here too; if your notes are very unstructured (raw transcript), paste more context so it can distinguish who said what.
  • If several small decisions get buried in a long discussion, paste the notes in roughly chronological order — the model traces action items back to source more reliably when the sequence matches how the meeting actually unfolded.