The problem
Meeting notes that are just a stream of what was said tend not to get reread, and the one thing people actually need afterward — who agreed to do what, by when — is buried inside the prose instead of being easy to scan.
Expected outcome
By the end of this guide you will have a short template that forces exactly the useful parts — decisions, action items, open questions — into their own scannable sections, instead of a wall of narrative notes.
Requirements and costs
- Any text/Markdown editor.
- Cost: free.
Step-by-step implementation
- Download the template from the link below.
- Fill in the purpose line before the meeting starts, if you can — a one-sentence “why we’re meeting” keeps the discussion anchored.
- During the meeting, only write in two places: Decisions made (stated as decisions, not discussion) and Action items (who, what, by when).
- Capture Open questions as they come up, rather than letting a raised-but-unresolved point quietly disappear.
- Send the filled-in notes to everyone who attended right after the meeting, while it’s still fresh.
A real example
A decision written as “We discussed the launch date” tells a reader nothing. Written to this template’s standard — “Decision: launch moves to [date]” in Decisions made, with “[name]: update the landing page copy, by [date]” in Action items — it’s unambiguous without needing to re-read the whole meeting.
Verification and troubleshooting
What we actually checked: the template’s three load-bearing sections are present and correctly structured — a “Decisions made” heading, an action-item table with Who/What/By-when columns, and an “Open questions” heading. This is a structural check of the template file, not a record of a specific real meeting.
Troubleshooting:
- Nothing goes in “Decisions made.” That’s a real signal the meeting didn’t actually decide anything — worth noticing in the moment, not just after the fact.
- The action items table keeps being empty. If a meeting regularly produces no action items, ask whether it needs to be a meeting at all, or could be a shared async update instead.
- You need more structure for a recurring meeting. Keep a running “Open questions” list across meetings instead of starting fresh each time, so nothing quietly falls off between sessions.
Free vs. paid
This is free and complete as a plain text/Markdown file. Paid meeting-notes tools add AI summarization, calendar integration and searchable archives — genuinely useful at scale, not necessary for a small team’s weekly sync.
What to do next
After a few meetings, skim back through just the Action items sections across them — a task that keeps reappearing, assigned to the same person, by a date that keeps slipping, is a more useful signal than any individual meeting’s notes on their own.
Free resources
The download is the full template.
Download the meeting notes template (ZIP, 1 KB)
Is there a paid version?
Not yet. This is the complete method. TNT Review has sold nothing to date and has no checkout, so any price we discuss in future should be read as a hypothesis, not an offer.