How long should meeting minutes be?

Short enough to be read the day they arrive, and complete enough to settle an argument a month later. For most client calls that is one page. This answer is for freelancers, consultants and anyone who writes minutes after a Google Meet or Microsoft Teams call and is not sure how much to put in. It branches from how to write meeting minutes.

What decides the length of meeting minutes?

The number of decisions, actions and open questions, not the length of the meeting. A ninety-minute call that settled two things deserves a short set of minutes; a twenty-minute call that changed the scope, the price and the deadline deserves a longer one. If you find yourself writing who said what in what order, you are writing a transcript, not minutes.

How long should each section be?

Section	Length
Heading	One line: client, meeting, date, attendees
Summary	Three to five sentences
Decisions	One sentence each, in the words that were agreed
Action items	One line each: what, who, by when
Open questions	One line each, with who will answer
Discussion	Only where a decision needs its reason; a few lines per topic
Next meeting	One line

The section most likely to bloat is discussion. Keep it only where someone reading the decision later would ask "why?", and write the reason in a sentence, not the debate.

When should minutes be longer?

When the minutes are the formal record of a body that approves them, or when a meeting was contentious. Board, committee and governance minutes often have to record motions, votes and who was present under rules that differ by organisation. A client call where something went wrong, or a scope change was argued over, is worth a fuller account of what was agreed and why. Otherwise, longer minutes are read less carefully, which defeats the point.

What should you cut from minutes that are too long?

Cut, in this order: anything only you need (that is notes, not minutes; see minutes vs notes), the order the conversation happened in, agreement noises, background everyone knew, and explanations of decisions nobody will question. Keep every decision, every owned action with a date, every figure, and every open question. If the result is still two pages, the meeting probably covered two meetings' worth of decisions, and that is fine.

How long are TrackHeros minutes?

As long as the meeting's content. By default, TrackHeros writes each Google Meet or Microsoft Teams project meeting into a fixed shape: summary, decisions, discussion by topic, agenda, milestones with dates, and action items with owners and due dates. Each client has its own minutes template with sections you can switch off, and a section the meeting left empty is dropped rather than filled. The client meeting minutes template shows the shape, and the meeting minutes page shows the export.