Minute taking training · Perth, Western Australia
Minute taking and agenda training shows secretaries, governance officers and executive assistants how to plan meetings, write clear agendas and record decisions accurately. David Julian Price delivers it in Perth and online, so your minutes stand up to scrutiny and your meetings start with a plan instead of a list. It’s part of David’s meeting effectiveness work.
Great meetings don’t just happen. Someone plans them, prepares the agenda, captures the decisions and chases the actions. This program makes that person’s job faster, easier and a whole lot less stressful.
“The minute-taker’s job is to record the decisions that are made, not everything that is said.”
The single biggest mistake minute-takers make
Somewhere along the way, minute-taking got confused with court reporting. Pages and pages of who said what, how long they said it and what everyone thought about it. That’s not minutes. That’s a transcript. And nobody needs one.
Read that quote again. It could save you hours after every meeting.
What minutes should capture
“But we’ve always done it this way”
If those seven words get regular airtime in your organisation, they’re the reason your minute-taker spends hours after every meeting reconstructing a word-for-word account of a two-hour discussion. There is a better way. A much better way.
The efficient meeting cycle
The system I’ve used for 40+ years as a professional chair and board secretary. Simple, fast and completely consistent with proper meeting procedure.
Prepare it on your computer, straight from the previous minutes plus any new items.
Ready to capture decisions as they happen. Not summaries. Not who argued for what.
Note each decision immediately, with the person responsible and any deadline.
The amended agenda becomes the working framework for your next meeting.
Organising meetings: whose job is it?
The meeting organiser rarely gets thanked, but they make the whole thing work. It might be an overstretched EA or PA, the chair, a facilitator, or a mix of roles. The more organised you are, the easier it is to handle difficult chairs and tricky situations.
The less you work, the more productive you become. During the pandemic lockdowns, organisations spent less time on two things, emails and meetings. Work still got done, decisions still got made, and outputs went up. The Meeting Management System is built on the same idea: know what you must do, and what you can leave out.
What you’ll learn
The questions that come up every single time
A half-day program with a full day of content. You leave with copyright-cleared templates you can use immediately. And if a tricky question comes up afterwards, email me and I’ll give you the answer you need.
What past attendees say
“Unlike other courses I’ve attended, not a minute was wasted. Will start using this method at the next program meeting.”Beverly Milloy · CSIRO Land and Water
“Exploded common myths about minute taking. I really thought I needed either shorthand or a tape recorder!”Michelle Watson · CSIRO Plant Industry
“After attending, I ‘secretaried’ one of the best meetings of the Bushcarers Group since being in this role. Thank you for giving me the courage to change.”Atlanta Veld · City of Albany
“Interactive, informative, extremely entertaining. I was particularly pleased that you didn’t read from a PowerPoint presentation or force us to trawl through pages and pages of notes.”Thea Rogister · City of Albany
“Great ideas worth waiting 30 years for. I’ve been looking for this information for 30 years. Thank you.”Phoebe Jones · Australian Sports Drug Agency
“Fast, informative, empowering and modern.”Frances Wilson · Dept of the House of Representatives
Why learn from me?
As the chair, the organiser, the secretary and the attendee. I’ve trained people from government departments, mining companies, law firms, medical organisations, charities and sporting bodies. The strategies I teach aren’t just practical. They’re professionally grounded and legally sound.
Prefer to watch?
Short, practical videos on running better meetings. Free on YouTube.
Questions
The decisions made, who is responsible for acting on each one, and any deadline. Plus the essentials for compliance, such as date, attendance, apologies and whether a quorum was present. They don’t need a record of who said what.
Generally, no. Minutes are a record of decisions, not a transcript. Check your constitution or governing rules, but in most organisations recording every comment creates more work and more arguments, not better minutes.
Build your agenda from the previous minutes, set up a document ready to capture decisions, and record each decision, owner and deadline as it happens. The minutes are then almost finished when the meeting closes.
Yes, politely and at the right moment. If you missed or didn’t understand a decision, it’s better to ask than to guess. The workshop shows you how to do it without disrupting the meeting.
It varies. It might be an EA or PA, the chair, a facilitator or a combination. What matters is agreeing who does what before, during and after the meeting, and following a system everyone understands.
It’s a half-day program with a full day of content, and you take away templates you can use straight away. It can be run in-house for your team.
David is a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), a Global Speaking Fellow and Past World President of the Global Speakers Federation, and a member of the Australian Speakers Hall of Fame. He brings 40+ years of real-world experience, plenty of humour and practical ideas people can use straight away.
Ready to transform your minute taking?
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your meeting culture won’t change overnight. But once people see the results, it gets a whole lot easier. Let’s talk about your meetings.
Or fill in the form below and we’ll get back to you faster than a Tim Tam disappears.