What Was Actually Decided

Notes record what people said. They do not record what needs to be done.

That gap is the whole failure. You leave the room with three pages of accurate transcription and nothing anybody can act on, because "we should probably look at pricing" got written down exactly as it was said, and exactly as it was said is not a decision.

Nobody wrote down the decision in a form that could be acted on. So two weeks later the meeting produces a second meeting.

So I built a prompt so that everything said can be done.

The prompt

It interviews you first, then pulls the notes itself. Do not clean anything up before you run it.

Turn my messy meeting notes into something I can act on and send.

Before you do any work, ask me these one at a time and wait for each answer:
- Where do my notes live? Which app, folder, or doc?
- Is there a transcript or recording you can reach as well?
- Can you read my calendar, so you know who was in the room?
- Which meeting are we doing?

Then pull the notes yourself. They will be fragments and half sentences that
only make sense to me. Do not ask me to clean them up. If you cannot reach
something, name the missing connection instead of working around it.

Give me back four things, in this order:

1. DECISIONS MADE - only things actually settled. If it was discussed but
   not decided, it does not go here.
2. OPEN LOOPS - decided nothing, still live. Name who has the ball, using
   the attendee list, not a guess.
3. COMMITMENTS - who owes what by when. If no date was said, write
   NO DATE GIVEN. Do not invent one.
4. WHAT NOBODY SAID OUT LOUD - the thing these notes circle around and
   never name. One paragraph. If there is nothing, say so instead of
   reaching for something.

Then write the follow-up email I should send, addressed to the people who
were actually there. Short. Plain. Not a summary of the meeting, only what
the reader needs to know or do. Draft it, never send it.

Never fill a gap with a guess. If something is missing, say it is missing.

Why the anti-invention rule is the whole thing

Every "summarize my meeting notes" prompt in circulation will produce a tidy list of action items with dates on them. Some of those dates were never said by anyone.

That is worse than no notes. A confident wrong date gets forwarded, gets planned around, and gets discovered three weeks later by the person who was going to be held to it.

Never fill a gap with a guess. If something is missing, say it is missing.

NO DATE GIVEN looks like a failure in the output. It is the most useful line in the report, because it tells you precisely which commitment you need to go pin down before it quietly expires.

The same rule is why section two reads the attendee list off your calendar instead of inferring who owns what. "Name who has the ball, using the attendee list, not a guess" is a small clause that stops the report handing a task to somebody who was not in the room.

Section four is the one people write back about

The thing the notes circle around and never name.

It is usually the reason the meeting felt slightly unfinished when you walked out. Everybody was polite about it. Nobody said it. And because nobody said it, it did not make the notes, so it comes back next month wearing a different subject line.

Section four is the only part of this that a person could not produce faster themselves, because the thing you cannot see in your own notes is the thing you were avoiding while you wrote them.

Then run it across a month

One meeting's notes tell you what was said. A month of them tells you something else entirely.

What keeps coming back without being decided. Who is quietly carrying the most commitments. Which dated promises passed and were never mentioned again. And the single decision you keep deferring that is holding the largest number of other things shut.

That version of the pass is on the tool page below. It counts what is written and refuses to estimate a number it cannot point at, which is what makes the meeting-tax figure at the end worth reading.