Minutes nobody has to tidy up

Most meeting minutes are written twice.

The first time is during the meeting: a column of fragments in whatever order people said things. The second time is afterwards, when someone - usually the person who took the notes - spends twenty minutes turning that column into something with headings, pulling the actions out of the middle of paragraphs and working out who agreed to what.

The second pass is where minutes go to die. It happens late, or it happens badly, or it does not happen and the column of fragments is pasted into an email that nobody reads past the third line.

The Meeting tab in Jot’s next release is an attempt to delete the second pass.

Type in order, read in structure

The idea is small. You keep typing in the order things happen, one line per point, exactly as you would in a text file. Each line is sorted the moment you press Enter:

topic: Budget
Q4 spend is 8% over plan
@John send the revised deck fri
decided we go with vendor B
I'll call the vendor
? who owns the migration

becomes

Agenda      Budget
Decisions   · we go with vendor B
Actions     John — send the revised deck (Fri)
            You  — call the vendor
Notes       Budget: Q4 spend is 8% over plan
Open        · who owns the migration

The typed order is kept - it is what gets stored, line by line. The structure is derived from it every time the minutes are shown. Nothing is rearranged on disk, which means nothing can be rearranged wrongly.

Actions belong to people, across the whole meeting

The part of the structure that matters most is the actions, and they are grouped by owner across the whole meeting. If John takes something on in minute four and something else in minute forty, the minutes show John’s two actions together. That is the view people actually want when the email lands: “what did I agree to?”

Every action has a checkbox. Ticking it later - in the minutes, in the app’s Open actions view that gathers every unticked action from every meeting - records it. Your own actions (I'll …, me: …, @me …) are also ordinary Jot todos, so they sit in your todo list with a due date and a reminder, and ticking one in either place ticks it in both.

The only correction is a click

Sometimes the sorting guesses wrong. A line that was a decision reads as a note; an action lands on nobody. The fix is not an editor. Every line carries a small chip - Decision, Action · John, Note - and clicking it changes the type or the owner. That is the entire correction interface.

This is deliberate. Jot is not a note app, and the moment the Meeting tab grows a text editor it becomes a worse version of every document tool you already own. The line is the interface; the chip is the undo.

Where it lives while the meeting runs

The same global shortcut opens Jot. Tab cycles through Note, Todo and Meeting. Once a meeting is running, the shortcut opens straight into it, so you do not navigate anywhere mid-call. A small pill with the meeting’s name and running time stays in the corner of the screen for mouse users.

Both the capture box and the pill are hidden from screen sharing by default. They stay visible to you and do not appear in a Teams or Zoom share - which matters, because the meeting you are taking minutes in is very often the one you are presenting to. How that works, and what has not been proven yet, is its own post.

When it ends

Ctrl + Shift + Enter, the End button, the pill or the tray menu ends the meeting, and the box turns into a send screen: the minutes, Copy minutes, and - if you have switched it on - Reply all in Outlook, which opens a reply to everyone on the calendar invite with the minutes already in it. Sending minutes people actually read covers that end of it.

What it will never be

It does not record. It does not transcribe. It has no microphone access and never will - that is a different product for a different person, and the anti-persona for Jot has not changed. It is the notes you would have typed anyway, sorted as you type them.

Where it stands

The Meeting tab is written and tested - the line parser, the minutes, the storage and the screens all have automated checks - and it is in the next release, not the current one. None of it has been walked on a real Windows machine yet: the screen-share hiding and the Outlook reply in particular. The roadmap says so, and will say something different once that has happened.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.