Turn meeting notes into action items

Why this prompt works

• →It assigns a role and a single job before showing any data, so the model reads the notes with a purpose instead of summarising them.
• →The output format is a contract — task, owner, deadline — which makes the result paste-ready for a tracker instead of prose you re-edit.
• →"Never guess a name" plus the "Needs clarification" bucket give the model an explicit escape hatch, which is what stops fabricated owners and dates.

Part by part

never guess a name

The instruction that keeps the output trustworthy. An invented owner circulates as an assignment, and the named person finds out when they are chased for it.

the deadline if one was mentioned

Conditional rather than required. A plausible date attached to an action is read as agreed, and nobody remembers it was inferred.

List decisions that were made separately from tasks

Two different things with different readers. Decisions need recording; tasks need doing, and mixing them buries both.

Needs clarification

A named home for the ambiguous, so it surfaces for a human instead of being resolved silently in whichever direction sounded most plausible.

Common mistakes

• Summarise these meeting notes.

  Produces a narrative of the discussion. Nothing in it is assigned or dated, so the meeting generates a record and no work.

• Extract the action items and assign owners.

  Asking it to assign owners guarantees invented ones. The model will pick whoever seems most associated with the topic, and that assignment then circulates as fact.

• Turn these notes into a to-do list.

  Loses the distinction between decisions and tasks, so a decision that needs recording is listed as something to do — and quietly gets re-litigated when nobody does it.

Questions