Best practice for regular meetings and their meeting-notes
Asked by Markus Raab:

Hey there ...

I am interested if you have any best practices or experiences how to handle meeting-notes for regular meetings.

If having regular meetings it may be of interest to look into the previous meeting-note to catch up on what happened. This may be simple notes, but also to dos as known as action items.

In our organization it is quite common that people copy their previous meeting-note and simply adapt it, delete, add content, etc.

However, I see also some disadvantages using this method and I do not think that this is how it was designed for.

(-) Content is repeatedly posted on pages which impacts searching/finding content

(-) Action items that are not checked, need to be transferred to the new meeting-note and deleted in the previous meeting-note

How are you handling this in your organization?


Answers:
author: Markus Raab
body: Does anyone has the similar challenges? I think it is a scenario that actually everyone has to face in business. People come together week by week and go on discussing matters of the previous week.

I just simply cannot believe that copying the previous meeting note week by week is the intended way of doing this.


author: Lukas Gotter _ Meetical
body: Hi all,

I've written a new article on our website on [Confluence Meeting Notes Best Practices](https://www.meetical.io/learn/confluence-meeting-notes-guide), how to get started, how to use the macros and reports, and summarized my experiences over the years with the Meeting Notes templates for Confluence.

Hope you find it useful!


author: Steve Ashton
body: Hi Lukas, always good to see an active provider in here!!  

Yes, I did mean the action items. We use them to create agenda items for our team (with the checkbox function) and also us @ user and // date to complete. What you mentioned first sounds good so we can still track open items and then even add other agenda items in the note later.

We currently just use the one Meeting Note and scroll past the closed items which gets confusing after a while. We then refresh the Note to a new one and manually transfer open items for that new page. Tedious and not conducive to confidence building...

I do like your idea of the empty column to trigger moving agenda items to the next meeting. It is sound logic that could help a lot of users.

Steve


author: Shahfazz
body: Hi,

Assuming we have different meetings and some of them are recurring as well. Does anyone categorizes the meetings separately which notes pages as children to category.

I want the meeting schedule to display at a single location and organize the meeting notes under each meeting type seperate. Has anyone done this or has any ideas?

Regards,

Shahfazz


author: blake
body: It would be great if some moderator could follow this up?

I find it hard to see how it can work ongoing because good structured meetings follow the same agenda and OFTEN progress towards large critical tasks or issues that span at least a couple weeks, if not a whole quarter.

I'm also finding it really messy, copying across each week, then going into the last week and "ticking off" all the action tasks that aren't done so there's no double up.


author: Anna Olenberg
body: Hi Peter,

yes, surely.

Lets say we have meetings notes from 5.11.19 and from today, the 5.12.19.

From the meeting notes of 5.11 there are still tasks open. Those open tasks I dont have in my meeting notes of 5.12, (I delete them, because I copy the page from 5.11 and make necessary adjustments) but instead I have a link to a page on the todays protocol, which contains all the open tasks from the old meetings --\> Task report.

The meetings notes of 5.12 I publish AFTER the meeting, so the new tasks of the todays meeting do not appear, while we check DURING the meeting the older tasks on the taskreport.

The taskreport shows alle the tasks with the labels "product name" and "meeting notes".

One screenshot of a meeting note you can find below, I hope it helps you.

many greetings, Anna![example how we work now in Confluence with the tasks.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/75195i704D46CD681E9006/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "example how we work now in Confluence with the tasks.png")


author: Anna Olenberg
body: having the same issue here. Still have no idea how to deal with double action items, if one copies the last meeting notes


author: Lukas Gotter _ Meetical
body: Hi, [@Steve Ashton](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/733334) thanks for the comments! Great to hear you're exploring the App! Feel free to get in direct contact with me via <https://meetical.io/demo> always curious to talk with forward-thinking Atlassian power users ?


author: Steve Ashton
body: [@Lukas Gotter](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/519005) - I also just got your app for my own home Confluence Cloud project so I can explore some functionality. It looks nice and I am hopeful it can help me to create a feeling of relaxed competence for our users.

Cheers

Steve


author: Lukas Gotter _ Meetical
body: Hi [@Steve Ashton](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/733334), happy to have you on the conversation here!

Regarding the tasks/action items in recurring meetings: With the [Meetical App](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1222405?hosting=cloud&tab=overview&utm_source=atlcom&utm_medium=discussion&utm_campaign=652592), you'll have a report on all open action items in a series automatically added on top of each occurrence. This way you don't need to copy/duplicate them to carry them over. Does that approach work for you?

The agenda items themselves however are not moved to the following edition automatically. It's an interesting idea we could explore together how to solve this. The challenge is that these items could be table rows or a simple bullet point list, and it's also not standardized how to determine if an agenda item is solved. However, maybe we could define such a standard. For example, I always use a table for the agenda and put the "Result" in the last column. Theoretically, we could move all items(rows) with an empty last column to the following meeting. How do you work and what would be your ideal solution?

"Great integration and transparency", are excellent goals! We have a new App upcoming to help with exactly that for Confluence Tasks. Stay tuned!

Regards, Lukas


author: Steve Ashton
body: I am struggling to find an answer, but your query is the closest to my own question so excuse me for dropping into your topic! :)  

I would like to have a recurring meeting series that automatically adds unresolved (open) issues from the previous meeting note.

It leaves the agenda points where they ended (eg, the date they were closed, they remain in that meeting note) but only open agenda points progress to the following edition of the recurring meeting.  

Has anyone any info on how to achieve this?

[@Lukas Gotter](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/519005) - is this something that Meetical can manage?

I am trying to convert our office into something that offers great integration and transparency and this seems to be a critical part of this.

<br />

Thank you


author: Lenka (F2S) Davis
body: Super useful. Thanks for the link to Best Practices.


author: LarryBrock
body: Take a look at the "Task Report" macro and consider incorporating it into a modified copy of the meeting notes template. Use this macro to collect and present action items from groups of pages like the page tree containing all the notes for a particular meeting. If copying the previous week's notes, just delete the action items on the new copy to keep from duplicating.


author: Carrie Levy
body: Our organization has the same need (copying previous meeting notes content to new meeting notes). Anyone found a better way to do this?


author: david_brown
body: I've just inherited some meetings that have/do use this approach. I agree it is far from ideal \& as far as I can tell seems to stem from wanting to be able to see what happened at a previous (or numerous specific previous) meetings.

To me it would make sense if there was a revision history \& you could create baselines (would need to be multiple) that way could (\& should as I see it) simply be able to amend the single copy of the meeting notes each time.


author: peter.egger
body: Hi Anna,

could you give us a little bit more detail, how the workaround works?

We are facing the same issue also in our company here....

Kind regards,

Peter


author: Anna Olenberg
body: Hi all,

we work now with a workaround, which was recommended by our Atlassian consultant. The "old" tasks do NOT appear in the new protocol per se, but all old tasks are shown with the task report macro below the new protocol or on a separate page.

greetings, Anna


author: Ted Steinmann
body: I have the same need. I'd like to create new meeting notes with actions from the previous discussions. I'd like to have a template that just pulls that in and doesn't duplicate action items, but rather rolls the text forward as discussion items.


author: Kadri Goins
body: Hi Markus, I am having the same dilemma, Have you had any progress?


author: Markus Raab
body: Thanks for your input Larry,

I'll consider this as well and it's a good idea to design it this way. The only thing I still not convinced is the copying of each meeting-note that happens in our organization.

I believe it's a habit and has to do with our organizational culture. However, I do understand that it may be useful to do it this way if someone wants to go on with what happened the week before.

Still interested if others have to contribute something to this topic.


author: LarryBrock
body: One effective strategy I've used is to create a parent page for each reoccurring meeting with some descriptive text about the meetings purpose and expected results plus three macros. The first was a "create from template" macro-generated button that launched a new *Meeting Notes* page under that parent. The second one listed the meeting note pages for each occurrence of the meeting. The third listed all the incomplete action items from that series of meetings for quick review either during the meeting or any other time

Hope this helps!  
--Larry


Tags: meeting

meeting-notes