Why meeting notes vanish into nothing
The thing about meetings is that we always leave with good intentions. I type everything into Notion while people are talking, I use the fancy slash commands to make bullets look clean, and then two hours later I cannot find the most important action point because it’s buried under five lines of vague phrases like “follow up on this item.” What does that even mean? I opened one of my older team docs the other night and half of it just said “decide later.” Not exactly helpful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When I tried Notion AI for the first time on meeting notes, the biggest surprise was how messy my prompts were. I literally typed “make this into a list of todos with names on them” and half the time it worked, but the other half it split one sentence into three separate to dos. It felt like talking to a slightly distracted intern who wants to help but also kind of zones out halfway through your explanation. The worst offender was when it thought “schedule lunch with client” was three tasks: schedule, lunch, and client. You can imagine the confusion when I showed that result to my manager.
The real challenge here is not the tool itself but asking clearly. Notion AI doesn’t know if “we should circle back on metrics” means I want a real action item or just empty talk. If you start your prompt by being ridiculously specific, like “assign this list of bullet points into a clear todo list with deadlines and person responsible,” you’ll get something way closer to useful. Otherwise you just get another meeting note that gathers dust.
How to write the clearest possible prompt
Here’s the beginner mistake I made: I assumed the AI would somehow know the difference between chatter and commitments. It doesn’t. You have to force it. The simplest method I found is literally just formatting my meeting notes with names at the start. For example:
– Alex to finish budget draft
– Priya to email design updates
– Me to check the broken webhook
Now, when I ask Notion AI “please restructure as action tasks with deadlines” it’s way more consistent. Versus if I write “we talked about the budget and Alex said something,” the AI will sometimes assign the wrong person.
I also discovered that smaller chunks are better than throwing the entire meeting transcript into a single prompt. When I pasted three pages of notes in one go, I got halfway relevant tasks mixed with random bullet points like “everyone smiled.” Funny, sure, but not exactly actionable. When I broke it into 10 to 15 lines at a time, the system gave me a much tighter list.
Another trick is asking AI to label in plain language. Instead of “make action items” I say “list who does what by when.” That’s not fancy, but wow, it works. Action point generation is basically babysitting your own notes until they make sense 😛
Assigning responsibility without confusion
Notion AI can reformat your notes, but if you do not tell it exactly who should do the work, it sometimes just writes “someone.” That’s the AI equivalent of shrugging at you while sipping coffee. What I learned is that you should insert names early in your prompt or literally include a table structure.
For example, I’ll highlight my notes and then type: “turn these into a table with three columns Name Task DueDate.” The AI reliably creates something that looks like this:
| Name | Task | Due Date |
|——–|——————————|————-|
| Alex | Finish budget draft | Next week |
| Priya | Send design notes | Tomorrow |
| Me | Fix broken webhook | Before demo |
Once that appears, editing becomes ten times faster. I don’t waste energy trying to remember who agreed to what during the chaos of the call. The caveat is that AI sometimes makes up dates if you don’t specify. I asked it for deadlines once and it confidently decided Alex’s part was due “today.” He was not amused.
Dealing with vague meeting language
The number one issue in most of my meetings is we keep saying phrases like “circle back,” “sync later,” or “take this offline.” If you ask Notion AI to extract action points from that, guess what, it happily produces: “Action Point Circle Back.” Useless. The fix I came up with is to go through the notes before I run the AI prompt and quickly translate corporate fluff into verbs. Instead of “circle back,” I write “follow up with sales team.” Instead of “take offline,” I write “schedule call without wider group.”
It’s a pain the first couple times but once you train yourself to convert vague phrases on the fly, the AI stops outputting nonsense. Honestly, the tool is not mind reading, it’s just repackaging what you give it. Garbage in, garbage out, as the old saying goes.
When Notion AI output feels clumsy
Sometimes you run the prompt and the output just doesn’t click. I’ve had it generate a list where every bullet started with “Start to.” Start to write, start to call, start to schedule. Reading that felt more confusing than my messy raw notes. In those cases I rerun the same prompt with just a small tweak. So instead of saying “extract action items” I’ll say “extract action items with strong verbs like send, finish, check.” Literally coaching the AI on grammar works better than hoping for good phrasing.
Another workaround I use is treating AI output as a draft, not the final result. I copy the table it generates, paste back into Notion as plain text, and then do a quick sweep where I rewrite vague stuff into something tighter. Ten minutes of cleanup beats half an hour of interpreting what “Start to follow up maybe” really means. 🙂
Building repeatable prompts inside Notion
I got tired of writing the same instructions over and over, so I actually created a template page in Notion with my favorite phrases. At the top it says: “Prompt for AI Action Items Use this wording exactly Turn notes into clear tasks showing who and when.” Then I just paste my bullets under it, highlight, and run the AI. It saves time because I don’t reinvent the wording every single meeting.
And because I know someone will ask, yes the template lives in my sidebar under a page called ‘Meeting Hacks’ buried under three other testing workspaces. I’d love to tell you I run a pristine, organized Notion setup but no. I currently have five untitled pages and one page simply called “notes2finalmaybe.” So the template saves me even when I forget how I phrased things last week.
Comparing with other AI tools
I tried a similar thing in Google Docs with their AI tools and surprisingly the results were not as consistent. Docs tends to give me summaries like “the team discussed budget planning.” That is technically true but it doesn’t tell me if anyone committed to do anything. For capturing actual action points, Notion seems better tuned out of the box. Trello has automation options too, but those usually trigger on key words and not natural meeting messy language.
If you just want to experiment, start with Notion since it’s built right where your notes already live. If you want to branch into heavier automation later, Zapier and even Slack bots can push those AI generated tasks into your workflow. For example, you can send that action point table straight into your project tracker. To compare different approaches, websites like notion.so give the main feature outlines.
Why imperfect prompts still help
Even when the AI produces janky results, it nudges you forward. I’d rather have a half baked action list I can fix than a blank page at the end of the meeting. I’ve had days where the output annoyed me, but then while editing I remembered an important commitment I almost forgot. So in a twisted way, the imperfection itself saved me. My habit now is to run prompts quickly, skim, rewrite where needed, and move on, instead of chasing perfect automation. Honestly, that feels more human anyway.