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People are usually fine at hearing “Sam, can you draft this by Thursday?” The failure shows up in the gap between the meeting ending and the work starting — the verbal commitment never gets written down with an owner and a date, or it gets recorded somewhere ad-hoc the owner doesn’t open, or it lands with ambiguous ownership and nobody feels responsible. Across a team running 50 to 200 meetings a week, those gaps compound into a substantial difference between what people thought was happening and what was happening. This is the entry-level Earmark workflow. If you’re not ready to stand up structured meeting notes, customer research, or the sales calls workflow yet, start here. It produces value on the first call, and it lives inside every heavier workflow — the action items section of the structured-notes template is this same extraction. This guide is a specific instance of the workflows pattern.

What the artifact looks like

A working session, three people, twenty minutes:
# Action items — 2026-03-04

## Action items
- [ ] **Marco** — finalize PRD section on auth — by 2026-03-07
- [ ] **Priya** — confirm rate limits with infra — by 2026-03-06
- [ ] **Marco + Lin** — align on launch comms — by 2026-03-10

## Unassigned — needs an owner before next meeting
- Decide who owns the security review request.

## Decisions that imply future action
- Going with option B for auth — requires comms to existing API users;
  owner not yet assigned.

## Things discussed but not committed
- Pricing change for the SMB tier — discussed; no owner or commitment.
- Possible partnership with vendor X — flagged; no commitment.

## Open questions blocking action
- Do we need legal review for the comms? — blocks "align on launch comms."
Five sections, one artifact. The action items are the core. The other four are scaffolding that keeps the action items honest — they catch what the model would otherwise either inflate into a todo or quietly drop.

The template that produces it

The Real-Time Meeting Minutes and Action Items built-in template (see the library) covers the basics. The version below is what to tune toward and save as a workspace template:
Extract action items and next steps from this conversation. Be faithful
to what was said — include only items that were actually committed to,
not items merely mentioned or speculated about. If ownership or timing
is unclear, mark it explicitly rather than guessing.

No emojis. No pleasantries, scheduling chatter, or filler. Be concise.

# Action items
For each commitment made in the meeting:
- [ ] **{Owner}** — {what, specifically} — by {deadline if stated; else "Unknown"}
  *Context:* one sentence only if the action item would not make sense
  without it.

If multiple owners share an item, list each. If ownership was discussed
but not assigned, list under:

## Unassigned — needs an owner before next meeting
- {item}

# Decisions that imply future action
Decisions made in the meeting that will require follow-through but where
no specific action item was named:
- {Decision} — likely needs {type of follow-up}; owner not yet assigned.

# Things discussed but not committed
Important — do NOT include these as action items. Briefly list things
that were discussed but where no commitment was made. This section helps
the reviewer catch missed commitments without polluting the todo list.
- {Topic} — discussed; no owner or commitment.

# Open questions blocking action
Questions that need to be answered before any of the above can move:
- {Question} — blocks {which action item, if applicable}
Three things in this prompt are load-bearing. “Only include items that were actually committed to.” The model’s strongest failure mode is promoting “we should think about this” into a Critical todo with a guessed owner. This instruction is the brake. The “Things discussed but not committed” section. This is what distinguishes the template from naive extraction. The model gets a place to put aspirational language honestly, and the todo list stays clean. On every cleanup, this is the section to read first — sometimes one of those items is a real commitment the model missed. “Unknown” as a legitimate value for deadlines. A guessed deadline is worse than a missing one. It looks authoritative and the team plans around it. The explicit option lets the model resist the temptation to invent.

Save it as a workspace template

1

Run the built-in template on a real call

Add Real-Time Meeting Minutes and Action Items as a task from the template library and run a real meeting through it.
2

Refine in the Composer

Open the artifact in fullscreen. Use the Composer to add the four scaffolding sections (Unassigned, Decisions that imply action, Things discussed but not committed, Open questions blocking action). Watch the preview reshape until it matches the example above.
3

Save with Workspace visibility

Open the Composer menu and choose Save as template. Set visibility to Workspace so the team produces the same shape. See Custom templates for permissions.

Run it on a single call

1

Pre-seed the meeting

Add the saved Action Items template as a task before the call. See Before a meeting.
2

State commitments out loud

Two habits sharpen the extraction dramatically:
  • State action items with owners and dates (“Sam, you’ll send the spec by Thursday”)
  • Name decisions when you make them (“OK, we’ve decided to go with option B”)
These are good meeting hygiene regardless of recording. They convert ambiguous extractions into clean ones.
3

Two-minute cleanup

This is the entire human-in-the-loop step. The checklist:
  • Read “Things discussed but not committed” first. If something there is a real commitment the model missed, promote it. More common than expected.
  • Cut over-generated items. If a todo does not reflect a real commitment, delete it.
  • Confirm owners. Especially for items the model flagged as unassigned. If you don’t know who owns it, the workflow is telling you something — assign it before the next meeting.
  • Confirm deadlines. “Unknown” is a valid value. A guessed deadline is worse.
4

Push to your destination

Send the action items to the task system you actually open. The fewer steps between cleanup and “in my task system,” the more reliable this workflow becomes. The Linear integration generates one ticket per action item; for other task tools, the structured format is designed to paste cleanly.
The destination has to be the surface where you actually plan your day. Routing todos to a tool you don’t open is functionally the same as not routing them. Match the destination to where work happens, not to where it should happen.

What this workflow doesn’t do

The big one for this workflow: there is no cross-meeting rollup inside Earmark. A “weekly view of every action item I committed to this week across every meeting” is a real productivity payoff, but it’s not a one-click feature today. Practical workarounds:
  • Push every action item to your task system as you clean up. Your task system already gives you the weekly view — that’s what task systems are for. Earmark’s job is to feed it accurately. Planning happens in the surface you use to plan.
  • Search past meetings with the command menu (Cmd+K / Ctrl+K) when you need to find “did I commit to something this week that I forgot?”
  • Export local transcript files if you want to run an external agent across a week’s worth of artifacts and produce your own personal rollup.
The repeatable template plus a destination that’s actually your working surface is what makes this useful. Without the destination, the artifacts pile up in Earmark and the action items never reach your day.

Variations

Same skeleton, two close relatives.

Personal — only my commitments

For pulling your own commitments out of a busy meeting and leaving everyone else’s:
Extract action items where the owner is {YOUR NAME} specifically.
Ignore commitments made by other participants.

# My action items
- [ ] {what} — by {deadline; else "Unknown"}

# Things I implicitly owe but was not explicitly assigned
Items where I was the most likely owner based on context, but no
explicit handoff was made. Flag for confirmation.
- {item} — likely mine because {reason from conversation}

# Things others owe me
Commitments other people made to me that I should track and chase
if they slip.
- **{Owner}** — {what they owe} — by {when}

# Decisions I need to communicate
- {Decision} — who I should tell.
Most useful for managers and senior ICs in many-person meetings: you get a personal action list directly, without scanning a fuller artifact to find your items. The Things others owe me section is the part most people don’t realize they want until they have it.

Sales and customer deal next steps

For external calls where the next step belongs to a deal, not to an individual:
Extract next steps from this sales or customer conversation. The output
is ready to paste into a CRM record for this opportunity.

# Deal: {Prospect or Company}
**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD
**Stage:** {if mentioned; else "Unknown"}
**Participants on customer side:** {list with roles if known}

# Next step — single most important
- **Owner:** me / customer / shared
- **What:** {exact action}
- **By when:** {date, or soonest reasonable target — flagged if not
  explicitly agreed}
- **Why this is the next step:** one sentence

# My side
- [ ] {what} — by {when}

# Customer side
- [ ] **{Their owner}** — {what they committed to} — by {when}

# Open questions / information gaps
- {Question}

# Risks and signals to watch
- {Signal} — verbatim quote if possible.

# Recommended CRM notes
A three- to five-line summary to paste into the opportunity record.
Lead with stage, next step, owner, and date.
The single most important next step framing is deliberate. Deals stall when a rep walks away with three vague next steps and no priority. Forcing the model to pick one keeps the deal honest. After the call, the Recommended CRM notes section is what gets pasted into Salesforce, HubSpot, or whichever record holds the opportunity.

Common pitfalls

  • Skipping the two-minute cleanup. The model over-generates action items. Without curation, the task system fills with phantom todos and trust in the list erodes.
  • Vague ownership. “Someone should look at this” is not an action item. Assign it or move it to open questions. The workflow tolerates “Unknown” deadlines; it does not tolerate unknown owners.
  • Todos that live only in Earmark. Items that don’t make it to a working surface don’t get done. The artifact is the record, not the work surface.
  • Routing to a tool you don’t open. Sending todos to Notion when you actually work out of Things means the todos may as well not exist.
  • Promoting discussion to commitment. The “Things discussed but not committed” section exists to prevent this. Read it on every cleanup.
  • Mixing personal and team destinations. Personal todos in the team board create noise; team todos in your personal manager create invisibility. Keep them separate by destination.
  • Letting “Unknown” deadlines pile up. A handful is normal. A list where 40% have no date is a list you can’t plan from. Periodically force the decision: commit a date, defer explicitly, or kill it.
  • Sales reps treating “next steps” as plural. A deal has one next step. If a rep walks away with three, the deal stalls while everyone waits to see which is real.
  • Treating extraction as fire-and-forget. Extraction is automatic; the workflow is not. The two-minute cleanup is what makes this work.

When to graduate to a heavier workflow

This workflow is the on-ramp. Two signals it’s time to add something on top:
  • You’re running the same kind of meeting weekly and want decisions and open questions captured too — graduate to structured meeting notes.
  • You’re running customer calls and want pain points, feature asks, and verbatim quotes alongside the action items — graduate to the customer research workflow.
Both heavier workflows include action items extraction as a section, so the habit you build here carries forward.

Where to go next