Ten Minutes After the Meeting — When Records Survive

When a meeting ends, everyone scatters to the next item on the calendar. "We will organise it later" at that moment usually means it will not happen. I deliberately keep ten minutes after the meeting ends. Those ten minutes preserve the day's decisions and open questions.

What to do in the ten minutes

1. Three lines of decisions
2. Open questions and next actions (owner, deadline)
3. One line on mood or tension signals (kept separate from fact)

That is enough. It does not have to be perfect minutes. It only has to be a seed you can pull out next time. If you have more time, append the remarks briefly in order; if not, stop at the three lines. Records that know when to stop last longer.

Keep the sharing short

Rather than sending a long document, share the core and keep the original note. Records only survive if the reader can read them and the writer can keep writing them. Linking with "the detail is in the note" tires people less than pasting a wall of text into a messenger.

You can also hand the tidying to AI right after the meeting. But the input should be the three lines you just wrote yourself. Dropping in a whole transcript mixes decisions and small talk with equal weight. Let AI structure the anchors a person chose first.

Put it in the calendar

Habits sit closer to the schedule than to willpower. Attach a ten-minute "tidy-up" block after the meeting block and the time does not disappear. It feels awkward at first, but after two or three repetitions the team starts expecting that rhythm.

Meetings are where talk gathers; records are where talk stays. Do not skimp on the ten minutes in between. Skimp and you will be saying the same thing again in the next meeting.