Minutes
Not every conversation worth remembering is with one of your own people. You take a call with a supplier, sit down with a prospective vendor, meet a partner to sort out a detail, and a week later the only record of it is your memory and a couple of half-finished notes. Minutes is where those conversations go instead: a title, when it happened, who was in the room, and a set of minutes you can look back on when it matters.
It’s the freeform counterpart to a touchpoint. A touchpoint is built around one of your own people and comes with structure; a meeting often has no employee in it at all, so it stays out of your way, just a place to write while you talk.
- Who can use it: managers always; supervisors when the setting permits. Your people don’t see it, since these records usually aren’t about them.
- Where: Sidebar → Minutes.
- Default: off. Turn it on at Settings → Modules.
Every meeting gets a reference number (MTG-DDMMMYY-XXXX), so it’s easy to find again later.
Reach for Minutes when you want a record of a conversation the rest of mizuiro doesn’t cover, which usually means one with someone outside your team:
- A supplier or vendor call whose details you’ll want to remember.
- An intro or catch-up with a partner.
- An interview or a scoping conversation with someone you might work with.
If the conversation is with one of your own people, and it’s about how they’re doing or what they’re working on, that belongs in a touchpoint instead. The quick test: is this about one of your people? Touchpoint. Is it about someone outside your team? Meeting.
- Go to Sidebar → Minutes.
- Click Take minutes.
- Give it a title, plain and recognisable (“Intro call with Rivet Supply”).
- Set when it was. It defaults to now, since the usual case is opening this while the meeting is already underway.
- Mark it in person or virtual.
- Note who was there. This is just a list of names you type yourself. Most people in these meetings don’t have a mizuiro account, so there’s no picker to work around.
- Write your minutes in the notes box (more on that just below).
- Click Save minutes.
No one is emailed when you save. These are your notes to keep.
If you use Tasks projects, the minutes form has a Project dropdown. Filing a meeting under a project lists it on the project page alongside the tasks, and any action items you add from those minutes go into the project automatically. Optional, and only shown when Tasks is on.
The notes box is a roomy, plain space you can type into as the meeting happens and tidy up afterwards. It doesn’t ask you to be neat in the moment. It also understands a little light formatting, so a long set of minutes stays readable:
- Formatting. Bold, italic, underline, and bulleted or numbered lists, all from simple markers you type yourself. The hint under the box shows the syntax, so there’s nothing to memorize. See formatting text.
- @mentions. Type
@and a name to link a person, whether they’re in your directory or an outside contact. If the person you name isn’t a contact yet, you can add them right from the box without losing your place. See @mentions. - #topics. Tag the minutes with a
#topicto group them with everything else on that subject. A meeting tagged#bellmodemturns up on that topic’s page alongside the tasks and other records that share it, which helps when the same thread runs across several conversations. See #topics.
Once you’ve saved, the meeting page has a What came out of it section. When the meeting leaves someone with something to do, add it here rather than leaving it in the body of the notes:
- Write what needs doing.
- Choose who’s doing it.
- Set by when.
- Click Add task.
Each action item becomes a real task in that person’s task list, linked back to the meeting, so it sits alongside the rest of their work instead of living only in a set of minutes. (Tasks carry their own email settings, at Settings → Notifications.)
Adding one follows the same rules as adding a task anywhere else: it’s for whoever can edit these minutes, you can assign it to the same people you could from the Tasks page (a supervisor, their own team and themselves), and the section only appears when Tasks is on. Someone you’ve sent the minutes to can read them, but not add tasks.
Send minutes on the minutes page picks people and sends them the write-up: an email with the PDF attached, and a note in their inbox. It also gives them access to the record in mizuiro from then on, so the link in that email actually opens. The page lists who has been sent them, which is a different list from who was in the room.
Only the person who recorded the meeting, or a manager, can send them, because sending hands out access. Whether the email goes out depends on When minutes are sent to someone at Settings → Notifications (off by default, like every notification); the access and the record of who received them happen either way.
You can come back and edit the minutes whenever you like, to clean up what you typed in the moment or add what you remember later. Only the person who recorded a meeting can edit or remove it, though a manager can tidy or remove any meeting in the company. Removing a meeting leaves any tasks that came out of it in place.
At Settings → Minutes, you choose who can take minutes:
- Managers and supervisors (the default). Supervisors take external meetings too. They see the meetings they recorded; you see all of them.
- Managers only. Supervisors won’t see the Minutes page at all.
Your people never see meeting records, whichever option you choose.
How is this different from a touchpoint? A touchpoint is a structured check-in about one of your own people, with a template, an agenda, and its own visibility rules. A meeting is freeform and usually about someone outside your team. If you’re recording a conversation with one of your people about their work, that’s a touchpoint. If you’re writing up a supplier call, that’s a meeting.
Can one of my people see a meeting they were in? No. A meeting is visible only to the person who recorded it and to managers.
I closed the window halfway through. Is it gone? No. Open Take minutes (or the edit page for the same meeting) again and a banner at the top offers to restore your unsaved draft. Drafts are private to you and expire after a week.
Do meetings send any emails? Only when you choose to: Send minutes emails the people you pick (if that notification is on). Otherwise the minutes are private notes, and the only other email they lead to comes from the action items you turn into tasks, which follow the Tasks notification settings.
NoteHow to read this: ✓ can see it, ✗ can’t, ○ depends on a setting or condition (explained under the table). As a manager, you always see everything in your company.
| What | You (manager) | Supervisor | Employee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meeting minutes and attendees | ✓ | ○ | ○ |
| Recording, editing, and removing | ✓ | ○ | ✗ |
- ○ Supervisor: only when Settings → Minutes is set to managers and supervisors (the default), and even then a supervisor sees only the meetings they recorded themselves, or ones sent to them, never another supervisor’s. Set to managers only, supervisors can’t take minutes, but still see any sent to them.
- ○ Employee: your people only see minutes someone has sent them with Send minutes, never just because they sat in on the meeting, and they can’t change them or add tasks.
- Action items are the exception: they become ordinary tasks, so whoever you assign one to sees it in their own task list, even though they can’t open the meeting it came from.