Taking good meeting minutes is an essential skill to acquire at work, as these important points which have been taken down are a summary of the past meeting discussion for you and your team to review later. Besides, knowing how to take good meeting minutes quickly during and after the meeting shows one’s strong professionalism and productivity.

Today, let’s talk about how to take impressive meeting minutes with XMind easily! Also note that our team just launched XMind.works, the web edition of XMind, making it even easier to take meeting minutes. In XMind.works web page, you can connect to personal drive services (Dropbox/Google Drive/OneDrive) so that you will be able to create a new mind map or edit existed ones with XMind anywhere and anytime. All features function exactly like the desktop version so there won’t be any learning difficulties!

What Makes Good Meeting Minutes?

Good meeting minutes need not only a rundown of the past meetings but also entails clear logic flow throughout the meeting discussion. The purpose of meeting minutes is to facilitate both the participants and absentees. Participants use the summary to refresh the memory of the meeting discussion and specify some business goals and actions of the next step. Absentees are given the meeting minutes to know the main theme and discussion of the meeting and be updated on the same page as participants.

Therefore, the following points make good meeting minutes:

• Write in a clear logic flow

Meetings are comprised of interaction and discussion. If you’re recording everything chronologically, then meeting minutes are likely to become very messy. So, the most important thing is to take the key points from every speaker and summarize those into a clear logic map, making your minutes more readable.

• Comprehensive notes with highlights

Comprehensive meeting minutes are more than welcome, but in most cases, highlights are important as well. Meaningful highlights catch readers’ attention and save their time from reading the comprehensive notes, and these are especially useful when presenting the minutes to your busy manager. Recommend using bullet points when taking meeting minutes.

• Have a conclusion to guide the next meeting

If a future business plan or an action is decided during the meeting, then a conclusion should include a clear instruction of who is in charge and what to do next. However, a conclusion doesn’t always need to be a definite action because in many cases, there is no conclusion/action by the end of the meeting. The team may have reached a certain agreement or not and will wait until the next meeting to pick it up. It is crucial then to record that progress as the final conclusion of the previous meeting so that it will guide the next one.

• Include basic information

Dates, location, participants. Basic information can be easily ignored but is super necessary to keep as a record.

How to Record in High Efficiency & Productivity?

Make Preparations Before Meeting

• Understand the background and purpose/theme of the upcoming meeting

An efficient meeting (cross or within departments) usually has a specified theme/goal and discussion topics. Therefore, understanding the overall theme and tasks of a meeting beforehand gives you more control over the meeting content and minutes-taking process.

It is also helpful when participants are starting to wander from the topic, you can bring the main task/purpose timely.

• Know well about the participants

For those larger-scale and more important meetings, it is necessary to study the information of key participants if they are unfamiliar to you, facilitating the note-taking process.

• Organize and preview meeting-related materials before meeting starts

If there’s any material needed to be discussed over the meeting, it is better for you to do background research, organize and preview some pages or slides to get yourself familiarized with the major content that will be discussed in the meeting.

Use XMind to Take Meeting Minutes

• Use structure & focus on key points to construct a logic flow

When getting used to how XMind work, you will notice that there is no need to take down minutes word by word but instead use the built-in (mind map) structure. The existed logic structure template allows you to have more time thinking, organizing and grasping speakers’ central ideas and logic structure to compose into a cohesive and structured meeting summary.

• Use Audio feature to note aside and discussion backup

The Audio feature in XMind comes especially convenient when trying to capture spoken information during meetings or other activities. By inserting an audio note into any topic box, the minutes’ taker doesn’t have to worry whether if a point is missed during the fast-paced discussion but can take time to review the audio piece and transfer into texts after the meeting.

How to Reorganize the Meeting Minutes?

• Grouped by Tasks

• Grouped by Speakers

It is very easy for you need to illustrate more details based on the structured XMind’s meeting minutes because XMind supports different forms of export including Word and Markdown. Better to do that within a half-hour after the meeting, as people forget easily!

As we mentioned at the very start, XMind launched its web edition – XMind.works! It can be used at any time anywhere with a browser, making it so much easier to take and share your meeting minutes. See an example below – this web edition works exactly like the desktop one, give it a try now!