Decision Logs vs Meeting Notes

Meeting notes and a decision log can come out of the exact same meeting and end up completely different documents, because they're answering different questions. Meeting notes answer "what happened in this meeting." A decision log answers "what did we decide, across every meeting, that's still true today."

That difference sounds subtle until you try to use each one for the other's job. Try to answer "why did we choose our current pricing model" from a folder of meeting notes, and you're stuck skimming transcripts from three different meetings over four months, in the hope that one of them happens to state the reasoning plainly instead of assuming everyone in the room already knew it. Try to answer "what was the general sentiment of Tuesday's planning meeting" from a decision log, and there's nothing there — a decision log only kept the outcomes, not the discussion.

Neither one is more "complete" than the other — they're built for different retrieval. Meeting notes are organized by when a conversation happened. A decision log is organized by what was concluded. If your team only keeps one of the two, you've picked which question you can answer quickly and which one you'll have to reconstruct by hand.

The practical version of this: keep meeting notes if you need a record of the conversation for reference or for people who missed it. Keep a decision log — or something more structured — if what you actually reach for later is "why did we decide this," because that question gets slower to answer, not faster, the longer it's buried in a transcript. See Decision Memory vs Meeting Notes for how a more structured decision record extends this further — separating the reasoning into its own field instead of leaving it embedded in a paragraph of notes.