I used to leave meetings with a page of notes and no idea what to do first.

Sounds dramatic, but if you're an EA supporting senior leaders, you know the feeling. Forty-five minutes of conversation. Twelve bullet points scribbled down. Half of them start with "Look into..." and the other half don't have a name attached.

Then the next morning, you're the one fielding Slack messages: "Did anyone follow up on the vendor thing?" "Who was supposed to send the proposal?" "What happened with the budget question?"

Here's what changed everything for me: I stopped treating meeting notes as one list.

Instead, I split every note into three columns the moment the meeting ends:

1. Decisions — Things that were agreed on. Done. No action needed, just documented.

2. Actions — Specific tasks with (ideally) an owner and a deadline. If the owner isn't clear, that's a flag.

3. Open Loops — Questions raised but not answered. Topics deferred. Things someone said "let's circle back on."

That's it. Three columns. Takes about 10 minutes after a meeting.

The magic is in the separation. When you mix decisions with actions with open loops, everything looks urgent and nothing gets done. When you separate them:

• Decisions go into the record and stop cluttering your task list

• Actions get assigned and tracked

• Open loops get flagged before they become "wait, what happened with..."

The biggest unlock? Open loops. Most EAs track decisions and actions fine. It's the open loops — the things nobody explicitly owns yet — that cause the "who was supposed to do that?" moments two days later.

Once I started catching open loops in real time, my next-morning handoffs got dramatically cleaner. My exec stopped asking "did we miss anything?" because we didn't.

If you're an EA who handles meeting follow-through, try the three-column sort on your next meeting. It takes no tools, no software, just a different way of looking at your notes.

I built an entire workflow around this — including an AI-assisted triage sequence and a same-day to next-morning handoff system. That's what TaskReady is. But honestly, start with the three columns. You'll feel the difference by tomorrow morning.