A weekly meeting can move a job forward, or it can produce a conversation that evaporates by Friday. The difference is whether the decisions have a date, a person responsible, and a home in the job file.

You do not need formal minutes written like a legal transcript. You need a short, dated record of what was decided, what is still open, and who owns the next step. That record is what you look at the following week, and what you look at months later when two people remember the meeting differently.

What belongs in the minutes, and in a decision log

Keep the minutes short enough that someone will actually write them, ideally the same day:

  • Date, job, who attended, and who wrote the notes
  • Open items carried forward, with owners and due dates
  • New issues, in plain language
  • Decisions made in the room: what was agreed, and what was not
  • Action items: who will do what, and by when
  • A pointer to any document that came out of the meeting: an RFI to be written, a sketch, a change to price, a revised sheet

A decision log is the running list behind those meetings. It can be a simple spreadsheet: date, topic, decision, who owns it, due date, status, and a link to the minutes or the follow-up document. Decisions should not live only in a paragraph of minutes nobody searches. If the group decided to move a door, change a product, or hold a pour, that should be findable without rereading twelve PDFs.

Write what was actually said and agreed, not what you wish had been. If something was left open, say it is open. If a direction was given, note who gave it. This is a filing habit, not legal advice, and it does not replace a change order. When a decision changes the work or the money, start the written change record too, as I describe in "Change Orders: Paper First, Then the Work."

Send the minutes to the people who were there, and to anyone who is expected to act, within a day if you can. File a copy of what you sent.

The miss this prevents

It usually goes like this.

In the weekly meeting, the group talks through a conflict and agrees, or seems to agree, on a path forward. Nobody writes it down, or the notes stay on a legal pad in the trailer. The next week, the owner, the designer, and the superintendent remember the agreement differently. Work has already started down one of those paths. Now you have rework, or a change that was never documented, and a meeting argument about what "we all agreed" meant.

The meeting was fine. The decision just had no date, no owner, and no file.

How to run it in the job file

Give meetings their own folder in the Google Drive or Dropbox job file, named by date: 2026-07-08_245_MTG_WeeklyOAC.pdf. Keep the decision log in the same job folder as the RFI and submittal logs, so a superintendent can open it on a phone.

A practical cadence:

  1. During the meeting, capture decisions and action items as they happen, even if the polished minutes come later the same day.
  2. File the minutes and update the decision log before the next morning if you can.
  3. Distribute the notes, and file the sent copy.
  4. At the start of the next meeting, walk the open items, not the whole history.

Used carefully, an AI tool can turn a rough note or a recording into a first draft of minutes. A person who was in the room still checks names, dates, and what was actually decided before that draft is sent. Do not let a polished summary invent an agreement nobody reached.

If the notes have been informal so far

Start the habit at the next meeting. You do not have to reconstruct three months of undocumented decisions unless a specific item is already in dispute.

If that sounds like your job, I can set up the job file, the minutes habit, and the decision log, run document control on a retainer, or prepare closeout. If you want help, bring the last meeting's notes, if they exist, and one decision that later got fuzzy.

The files stay yours.

If you want help, not just a checklist

Some jobs run fine on a clean file and a superintendent who gives the log fifteen minutes twice a week. Others do not: revisions are moving fast, closeout is already behind, or the field simply has no hours left for paperwork.

That is where I come in. I set up the job file, run the logs on a retainer, or prepare closeout before the scramble starts. Your files stay yours, and there is no software contract to sign.

Email travis@builtonrecord.com Get the free Job File Kit