How to write meeting minutes in minutes (with an example)

Useful minutes aren't a word-for-word transcript — they're an actionable summary. At minimum they should have: the topics covered (ideally organized into blocks or chapters), the key points or decisions made, and the pending action items with who's responsible for each one.

If the minutes stop at "we talked about X and Y" with no clear decisions or owners, in practice nobody looks at them again and the tasks get lost.

The classic method is to record the meeting (or take live notes) and write the minutes afterward, going back over the recording so nothing gets missed. It works, but for a one-hour meeting that's easily another half hour or more of extra work, usually after the meeting has already ended and your attention is elsewhere.

With SwiftBOL, you record the meeting (or upload the audio if you already have it) in Work mode, and within minutes you get: an overall summary, chapters by topic with timestamps, and a list of action items with the assigned person when it's mentioned in the audio.

From there you can export the minutes directly to PDF or Word, copy them as Markdown to paste into Notion, or generate a public link to share with anyone who wasn't in the meeting, no account needed.

Meeting title and date · 2-3 sentence summary · Chapters: "Opening & agenda," "Project status," "Budget," each with its own summary · Action items: "Maria — prepare the QA checklist," "Javier — review pricing copy." That's the same structure SwiftBOL generates automatically from the audio, with nobody having to type it up by hand.