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.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tryearmark.com/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
What the artifact looks like
A working session, three people, twenty minutes:The template that produces it
TheReal-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:
Save it as a workspace template
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.
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.
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
Pre-seed the meeting
Add the saved Action Items template as a task before the call. See Before a meeting.
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”)
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.
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.
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.
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:Sales and customer deal next steps
For external calls where the next step belongs to a deal, not to an individual: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.
Where to go next
- Workflows — the general shape this is an instance of
- Custom templates — visibility, sharing, and edit permissions
- Before a meeting — pre-seeding tasks so extraction runs live
- After a meeting — producing audience-specific outputs from the same transcript
- Structured meeting notes — the heavier workflow this one nests inside
- Customer research workflow — the variant specialized for discovery calls

