This meeting minutes template may be simple, but baked into it are some general best practices that will help make your meeting effective.

First, what type of meeting are you having? Is it purely to give updates? Is there a discussion (but no decision to be made)? Or is it a full-on decision-making meeting. The answer may seem obvious, but going through this exercise helps direct the meeting in a good direction. It also helps you make sure your meeting isn't aimless. If there is a discussion without any decision after it, should there be? Can a decision be made?

This leads into the next tidbit of info in this simple meeting minutes template, which is to state the goal of the meeting. You may want to delete this out of the agenda sometimes (if it is totally obvious).

An example goal for the meeting might be, "Decide whether to renew the contract for another year." Or it might be, "Summarize where we're at on the project and assign all upcoming tasks." For more on meeting goals, check out this quick video on how to state the purpose of a meeting:

The next part of this meeting notes template is the agenda itself.

Agendas are fairly straightforward. Before the meeting, jot down all the topics and issues to be addressed at the meeting. In your meeting minutes, fill in these items with brief summaries of what was discussed or decided. Learn how to create killer meeting agendas. Or, check out this meeting preparation checklist.

Finally, every good meeting minutes template has a place for action items or next steps. Whenever you collectively agree to do something in a meeting, write it down in your meeting minutes. Assign that action item to a specific person, and assign a due date if you know one. And, if you use this simple meeting minutes template in Hugo, you can also use our native task tracking to record these action items, which allows you to get notifications and stay extra organized.

‍