Managing To Dos in recurring meetings, when there's no agreed upon tool

Meetings often lead to to dos and tasks that need tracking. Especially when you're moderating a recurring meeting, like a status meeting, you want to make sure you're on top of these to dos. One challenge I sometimes face is, that there's no common tool for managing to dos that all participants of the meeting use. The reasons for this can be manifold. Different departments use different tools, different tools are used for different kinds of to dos, ...

One approach that has worked well for me for recurring meetings where multiple departments participate, is to create one long meeting notes document and track the to dos within this document.

Because most people know Word and feel comfortable with it, it usually ends up being a Word document. While writing the meeting notes I just add to dos in the following format.

• %status-emoj% TODO[%optional-id%] %assigned-to% [%optional-due-date%] %to do%
  • %date% %status-info%

An example within some made-up meeting notes looks like this:

It's time to replace servers in segment B2 before we launch "Fancy Product". Marc suggests we should switch from Intel to AMD because of performance and pricing.

• TODO-001 John 2025-01-21: Make suggestion for new servers (Intel vs AMD)

You can go as fancy or as bare bones as you want with the format.

• TODO John: John needs to do something
• TODO John 2024-12-31: John needs to do this by the end of the year
• 🔁 TODO-001 John 2025-01-31: John ...
  • 2024-12-04 First milestone reached
  • 2024-12-15 John needs more time because project A got prioritized, due date adjusted from 2024-12-31 to 2025-01-31
• ✅ TODO-001 John 2025-01-31: John ...
  • ...
  • 2025-01-31 Done

If you're using Word you have the added benefit of having a decent to do list by searching the document for "TODO-".

It sure is not perfect, but it works - at least for me. In keeping with my initial post about using RFC 2119 to convey intent, here are my rules for these sort of to dos.

• To dos must be written down for all participants of a meeting to access
• To dos must be assigned to at least one person
• To dos should have a due date
• To dos should be tracked in the tool appropriate for the assignees of the to dos. If the participants can't agree on one tool, the above format can be used.