会议议程与行动清单

Action-Item Discipline — why meetings without owned actions are theater#

The third discipline of the meetings skill: the meeting's output is not the discussion, the slides, or even the decision — it is the set of committed next actions that exist afterwards. A meeting that ends without owned, dated actions consumed its budget and produced a feeling. This file documents the canon behind action_item_extractor.py and its two flags, ORPHAN (no owner) and NO-DUE (no date).

The next-action rule (why vague intentions don't survive)#

David Allen's Getting Things Done (Penguin, 2001) built its entire system on one observation: outcomes don't get done, next actions do. "Handle the pricing situation" is a project; "Maria sends the pricing one-pager by Friday" is an action. Allen's test — what's the very next physical, visible activity, and who takes it? — is exactly the shape the extractor demands: a verb, an owner, a date. Anything in the notes that fails the test ("we should think about X", "the team agreed X matters") is deliberately not extracted, because promoting sentiment to a checklist launders vagueness into false progress.

One owner, not a committee#

Every extracted item gets exactly one owner or an ORPHAN flag. This is the "Driver" / "Accountable" insight of the DACI and RACI decision frameworks (documented in the Atlassian Team Playbook's DACI play): when a task has two owners it has zero, because each can reasonably assume the other has it. The extractor never auto-assigns an orphan — assignment is a human commitment, and a name typed by a script is not a commitment. The flag's job is to force the assignment conversation while the room (or thread) still remembers agreeing to the work.

A date, or it drifts#

George Doran's original SMART memo ("There's a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management's Goals and Objectives," Management Review, 1981) made time-bound one of the five criteria for a reason: an undated commitment cannot be late, so it never becomes urgent, so it loses every scheduling contest against work that can. The extractor captures "by/due/before " phrasings and flags the rest NO-DUE. The fix costs five seconds at recap time ("Alex — by when?") and is the highest-leverage edit anyone makes to meeting notes.

Implementation intentions (the psychology of "who + when")#

The owner + date rule is not managerial superstition; it has a mechanism. Peter Gollwitzer's implementation-intentions research shows that goals formulated as if-then plans — specifying when, where, and how the action happens — are acted on at substantially higher rates than equally-motivated abstract goals, across dozens of studies (Peter M. Gollwitzer, "Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans," American Psychologist, 1999; meta-analysis: Gollwitzer & Sheeran, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006). An action item with an owner and a date is an implementation intention; one without is a wish. Likewise, Locke and Latham's goal-setting research — the most replicated result in organizational psychology — shows specific, difficult goals reliably outperform "do your best" vagueness (Edwin A. Locke & Gary P. Latham, "Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation," American Psychologist, 2002).

Follow-through is the dropped phase#

Steven Rogelberg's meeting research finds the post-meeting phase is where most meeting value leaks: actions go unrecorded, unowned, or unrevisited, and recurring meetings quietly re-discuss last week's conclusions (The Surprising Science of Meetings, Oxford University Press, 2019). His prescriptions map one-to-one onto this skill's mechanics: end with a recap of commitments (the agenda builder's mandatory closing slot), record owner + deadline for each (the extractor's output shape), and open the next meeting against the last list (the emitted markdown checklist is built to be pasted into the next agenda's pre-read).

Why extraction is deterministic#

The extractor uses fixed patterns — checkboxes, ACTION:/TODO: prefixes, "@name will …", "Name will … by date" — rather than judgment. Two reasons. First, auditability: anyone can look at a line of notes and know whether it will extract, so the discipline is teachable ("write it as ACTION: @sam … by Friday and it will never be lost"). Second, honesty: a fuzzy extractor that infers actions from vibes recreates the original problem — commitments nobody actually made. If the notes contain no extractable actions, the correct output is the uncomfortable summary line saying so, not an invented checklist.

Sources#

1. David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, Penguin, 2001 (next-action discipline; the verb-owner test).
2. Steven G. Rogelberg, The Surprising Science of Meetings, Oxford University Press, 2019 (follow-through as the dropped phase; end-with-recap prescription).
3. Atlassian Team Playbook, "DACI: Decision-making framework" (single Driver/Accountable; two owners = zero owners).
4. George T. Doran, "There's a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management's Goals and Objectives," Management Review, 1981 (time-bound as a first-class criterion).
5. Peter M. Gollwitzer, "Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans," American Psychologist, 1999 (and Gollwitzer & Sheeran 2006 meta-analysis) — who/when/where plans get acted on; wishes don't.
6. Edwin A. Locke & Gary P. Latham, "Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation," American Psychologist, 2002 (specific goals beat vague ones).