Action item
The next task coming out of a meeting or discussion that makes clear who does what by when. It is the core of a system that raises follow-through.
An action item is a next task that makes clear “who” will do “what” “by when” as a result of a meeting or discussion. It is nearly synonymous with “things to do” or “TODO,” but in business contexts the term action item is often used. Even when something is decided in a meeting, if the owner and the deadline stay vague, it tends to vanish without being carried out.
The 4 elements of an action item that gets done
- Who
- Who is responsible
- What
- What will be completed
- When
- By when it will be completed
- How
- By what method or in what place it will be reported
The difference between good and bad action items
A format for recording and tracking
Do not bury action items inside the meeting minutes; spell them out in a dedicated section. In Markdown, using checkboxes makes progress easier to manage.
Connecting to task management tools
Transferring from the minutes to a task tool
- Transfer them to Asana / Jira / Linear / Notion or similar, aiming for within 24 hours
- Some AI meeting-minutes tools, such as Otter / tl;dv, include features that connect to task tools
- Once they are tasks, it becomes easier to leave progress tracking and pre-deadline notifications to the tool
- Minutes alone are hard to search and items tend to get buried
Typical patterns where the practice breaks down
The practice of action items is sustained not by “writing them” but by “reviewing them at the next meeting.” In meetings that do not check the previous action items at the start, no one notices when what was written is left untouched, and before long the practice becomes an empty formality. Another way it breaks down is assigning “everyone” as the owner. A task owned by everyone becomes a task owned by no one, and it tends to stay untouched. As a rule, narrow the owner to one person, and for tasks involving several people, write the main owner and the shared parts separately.