Three failures show up everywhere meetings happen. Decisions get relitigated six months later because nobody captured the reasoning. Todos verbally agreed to in the room never make it onto a list with an owner and a date. Real questions get raised, set aside, and surface three meetings later as if they were new. None of these show up in any single meeting. They show up in the gap between meetings, which is the zone nobody owns. This is the workhorse Earmark workflow. If you only stand up one, stand up this one. The customer research, sales calls, and people and team meetings workflows are all variants of its skeleton. This guide is a specific instance of the workflows pattern.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tryearmark.com/llms.txt
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What the artifact looks like
A worked example — a weekly leadership sync deciding launch readiness:The template that produces it
Earmark ships aReal-Time Meeting Minutes and Action Items built-in template (see the library) that’s the natural starting point. The version below is what you tune toward — copy this prompt into the Composer, run it on a real meeting, refine, then save as a workspace template.
Save it as a workspace template
Run the built-in template on a real meeting
Add Real-Time Meeting Minutes and Action Items as a task from the template library. Run a real working meeting through it.
Rework the prompt in the Composer
Open the artifact in fullscreen. Use the Composer to iterate toward the shape above — add your vocabulary block, tighten the headings, require verbatim quotes on decisions. Watch the preview reshape until the artifact lands.
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 and sharing.
Agenda hygiene is the highest-leverage habit
The template works dramatically better when the meeting has named agenda items. Two habits cover it:- Send the agenda in the calendar invite. Three lines is enough. The template uses these as top-level headings.
- Name agenda transitions out loud. “Moving to the staffing question.” The model picks these up from the transcript and groups notes correctly.
Run it on a single meeting
Pre-seed the meeting
Open the meeting in Earmark before it starts and add your saved Structured Notes template as a task. See Before a meeting.
Customize context if needed
Use the Customize context dialog to add anything not obvious from the calendar invite — the decision the meeting needs to land, the people who couldn’t attend, the constraint to keep in mind.
Run the meeting
Earmark generates the artifact live. Two habits help it be sharper:
- Name decisions explicitly out loud (“OK, so we’ve decided X”)
- State todos with owners and dates (“Sam, you’ll own the draft by Thursday”)
Spend five minutes on cleanup
This is the highest-leverage step in the whole workflow. The checklist:
- Cut hallucinated items. If a todo or decision isn’t grounded in the transcript, delete it.
- Confirm todo owners. Ambiguous cases (“we should look into this”) may get assigned to whoever spoke last. Fix.
- Confirm deadlines. If one wasn’t stated, leave it Unknown. Don’t invent.
- Distinguish decided from discussed. If it was discussed but not decided, move it to open questions.
- Sharpen the headline of the shareable summary. Promote the most important thing from the body if the model didn’t.
Route the outputs
Send the artifact to the destinations you picked when you set this up:
- Todos → your task system. The Linear integration generates one ticket per todo with a link back to the artifact; for other task tools, paste.
- Decisions → your decision log (a Notion page, a Confluence space, an internal wiki — whatever your team uses).
- Open questions → the next meeting’s calendar invite, as agenda items.
- Shareable summary → the Slack channel or email list for that meeting series.
- Full artifact → stays in Earmark as the source of truth.
Variations for recurring and high-stakes meetings
The same workflow handles two adjacent cases with template tweaks.Recurring team syncs
For meetings that happen on a schedule — weekly leadership, project standups, business reviews. Add two sections to the universal template:Earmark refines artifacts within a single meeting — it doesn’t automatically pull last meeting’s todos into this one. The way to make the continuity loop work today is to paste last meeting’s todos and open questions into the Customize context dialog before this meeting starts. The template instructs the model to use that context as the status section.
High-stakes decision meetings
For meetings whose primary purpose is to make a decision — launch go/no-go, hiring decision, strategic bet, vendor selection. The decision becomes the centerpiece, not an item in a list. A separate template:What this workflow doesn’t do
Earmark generates and refines artifacts inside a single meeting. Cross-meeting state — pulling last week’s todos into this week’s artifact automatically, or maintaining a running decision log inside Earmark — is not a one-click feature today. The way to make these work in practice:- Continuity between recurring meetings: the artifact owner pastes last meeting’s todos and open questions into the Customize context dialog before the call. The template uses that context as the status section.
- A running decision log: keep it as a separate page in your wiki of choice (Notion, Confluence, a single internal page). After each meeting, copy that meeting’s decisions into the log with a link back to the artifact.
- Searching across meetings: the command menu (
Cmd+K/Ctrl+K) is how you find “did we ever decide X” without spanning meetings. - A team-wide rollup: export local transcript files and run external synthesis when you want a quarterly review.
Common pitfalls
- No agenda. The template degrades noticeably without named agenda items. Thirty seconds in the calendar invite is the fix.
- Skipping the five-minute cleanup. Auto-generated artifacts have noise. Without curation, the noise compounds and trust in the artifact erodes.
- Todos that live only in the artifact. Todos that don’t make it to the task system don’t get done. The artifact is the record, not the work surface.
- Treating discussion as decision. “We talked about X” is not a decision. Be strict about what the Decisions section contains.
- Open questions accumulating. A list of eighty indefinitely-open questions is a list nobody reads. Resolve, convert to todos, or retire — but don’t let them sit.
- Vocabulary drift. New product names, new customer names, new acronyms emerge constantly. Update the vocabulary block monthly.
- Template sprawl. The universal template covers most meetings. The recurring and decision variants cover the rest. Three is enough.
- Posting the full notes everywhere. Channels get noisy, people unsubscribe, the summary stops being read. Post the shareable summary; link the full artifact.
- No decision log. The highest-regret omission. Start one in week one — even an empty Notion page is enough — and fill it in as you go.
- Owner change without handoff. When the meeting owner changes, the cleanup discipline often lapses. Hand off the workflow explicitly — not only the meeting.
Quickstart checklist
For a team standing this up from scratch:- Pick two or three meetings to start with — not all of them
- Add a one-line agenda habit to those calendar invites
- Write your vocabulary block (names, products, customers, acronyms)
- Pick destinations: task system, decision log location, Slack channel
- Assign a cleanup owner for each recurring meeting
- Save the universal template as a workspace template with your vocabulary block inserted
- Run it on the next three meetings, with the five-minute cleanup each time
- Start the decision log — create the page, even if empty
- After two weeks, add the recurring-sync variant for any meeting that happens on a schedule
- After a month, review which meetings the workflow is paying off in and expand from there
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 and using Customize context for continuity
- After a meeting — producing audience-specific outputs from the same transcript
- Customer research workflow — the same skeleton, specialized for discovery and user interviews
- People and team meetings workflow — the same skeleton, specialized for 1:1s, skip-levels, interviews, and standups
- Shareable summaries workflow — the communication layer for the shareable summary section