Take Effective Meeting Notes in Confluence 📝

[#1]

As a Product Manager, I spend a lot of time in meetings. I’m always looking for ways to streamline my processes and communications to use my time effectively and ensure all meeting attendees feel their time was worthwhile! ⏳ 

I enjoy taking clear meeting notes to stay tuned in to meetings and ensure everything discussed is documented. As a remote worker, I also love using an AI meeting summary to review and add anything I may have missed. If your video conferencing software doesn’t offer something, there are many apps out there that you can add on to help streamline your online meetings.

One of my most used (and favorite!) Confluence templates is the Meeting notes template. 

📄Start with a template

Tip: ⭐️Star your favorite templates for easy access

Confluence has a plethora of templates available. A blank page can be daunting, but once you grab a template you’ve got a blueprint to success at your fingertips! 👆

If you find that this template doesn’t quite suit your needs, you can also create your own template! 

@Tag Participants

No agenda? That’s a problem. To ensure all attendees are prepared for the meeting, ensure your agenda is clear and accessible. By notifying attendees in advance, they can help add anything extra to the agenda prior to the start of the meeting. 

 

@mentions automatically notify attendees of the page through Confluence’s notifications. Confluence does the heavy lifting for you. (You can also easily link to the Confluence page in your calendar invite by clicking the blue “Share” button once you’ve published your page!) 

🗂️ Keep your meeting notes in one place

It’s important to record the discussions and decisions made throughout the course of a meeting. This helps attendees remember what occurred during the meeting and keeps other key stakeholders updated who weren’t able to join. By making these discussions available to everyone, your team can stay informed after the meeting.

Keep your meeting notes in one place. Depending on how you have organized your Confluence space, you’ll want to decide the proper place for your notes and agendas. Depending on the topic of the meeting, my notes may be kept as children of the product spec, or for meetings that repeat - we have one long-running meeting notes page that can easily be searched.

❓Who is doing what?

An effective meeting is one that acts as a launching pad for more work following the meeting. Too many meetings fizzle due to a lack of action items. Confluence Tasks are perfect for kick-starting activity after a meeting. It’s easy for the meeting attendees to track the work that needs to get done and by whom, and when tasks are completed every attendee is automatically notified.

✅ Tip: Find out more about taming those to-do’s in this article: Effective Meeting Notes in Confluence - Your Action Items will not remain unresolved any longer

🥾Want a step-by-step guide to using the Meeting notes template? Checkout the full Play here: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/meeting-notes

[Andy Gladstone]

@Amanda Barber thanks for sharing a great user-case for Meeting Notes Template. 

I have a weekly recurring meeting that I use a tweaked version of the Meeting Notes template with. Rather than cating a new page for each meeting I have created sections on the page for each instance of the recirring meeting, along with the Decision and Task Report macros so we can see previously decided upon decisions and open action items.

[Amanda Barber]

Great idea, @Andy Gladstone - I love that you have the Decision and Task Report macros to keep track of everything outstanding!

[Dave Liao]

@Amanda Barber - love this!

📋 The Task Report macro has been helpful to aggregate any tasks mentioned. Good reminder to use it more...

@Andy Gladstone - I also keep an ongoing page (a "sync doc") for each stakeholder / stakeholder team (depending on the engagement).

After a period of time (again, depends on the level of activity per engagement) I'll retire the page and make a new one. Don't want those sync docs to get too long!

[gperrego]

The task and decision macros are great but what about a "notes macro"? The need is to not go into the edit screen to update meeting notes.  When working with management going into the edit screen while reviewing items is not pretty. 

[Amanda Barber]

@gperrego I often just save my meeting notes links as "edit links" to automatically open them in edit mode (in my calendar invites, for example.)

[Summer Hogan]

Thanks for this great information @Amanda Barber! I'll definitely put this to good use and great idea about The Task Report macro @Andy Gladstone and @Dave Liao. That's a good one! 

[jcharette]

I'm researching Confluence and came across this post.  This is great.  Does Confluence have the ability for me to write using a digital pen, and it converts it to text within the app?  I take notes on paper and want to switch to a digital solution.  I don't want to use a third-party app and then copy and paste it into Confluence if I don't have to.

[Amanda Barber]

@jcharette - Confluence does not currently support that.

[jcharette]

@Amanda Barber, too bad.  Thanks for replying!

Is there a community request page somewhere to submit and upvote it?

[Amanda Barber]

@jcharette - I believe you could do that here! https://jira.atlassian.com/projects/CONFCLOUD/summary