Before: put the agenda in the tree
Open the Meeting notes template. It has four branches: Attendees, Agenda, Decisions and Action items. Rename the root to the meeting and date, for example “Design review, 14 Oct”.
If the agenda already exists as a list in an email or doc, copy it, select the Agenda node and press ⌘V. Indented text pastes in as branches, one node per line, so a bulleted agenda arrives already structured.
During: one node per point
The keyboard flow is what makes live notes possible:
- Select an agenda item and press Tab to note what was said under it. Enter adds the next point at the same level.
- When something is agreed, write it as a decision in plain words: “Ship the onboarding change behind a flag”. Then move it to Decisions by dragging, or leave it where it is and tidy up afterwards.
- For actions, use one pattern every time: who — what — when. “Priya — draft rollout email — Thu” is searchable and easy to scan; “email” is not.
Typeahead earns its keep in recurring meetings. Names of people, projects and systems you have typed before are suggested from your own notes, even offline, so they come out spelled the same way every week. With AI on, suggestions also follow the branch you are in: under Action items they look like tasks, under Risks they look like risks.
After: check the map, not the transcript
Switch to the mind map (⌘⇧M) and look at the shape. Every agenda item should lead somewhere: to a decision, an action, or an explicit “parked”. An item with a long tail of discussion and nothing else is the one to follow up on before people forget the context.
Collapse the discussion with ⌥1 and the map shows only the four headings. Expand Decisions and Action items and you have the summary people actually read.
Summarising a transcript
If you have a transcript or a long chat thread, Generate › Summarize pasted text turns up to 6,000 characters into a map you can edit. Read it against the source before sharing: summaries can miss a caveat or merge two decisions. The text is sent to our AI provider (Groq), so check your company's policy and the participants' expectations first. If in doubt, leave AI off; everything else works without it.
Share it where your team already works
- Markdown pastes cleanly into issue trackers, wikis and chat. The tree becomes a nested list.
- HTML is a single file you can attach to an email or open in any browser.
- PDF or PNG of the map works for a quick visual recap in a slide or a message.
Recurring meetings
Duplicate last week's note from the note menu and delete what is done. Open actions carry over in their own branch, which makes the first agenda item obvious: “Last week's actions”.
To find when something was decided, press ⌘K and search. It matches the text inside every node, not just note titles, and shows the path to each result, such as Design review, 14 Oct › Decisions.
If you take notes on a work laptop and read them on your phone, sign in with Google to sync. Otherwise the notes stay in the browser you wrote them in.
Open the meeting notes template before your next call.