How to Write a Meeting Agenda (Templates + Examples)

A good meeting agenda lists the meeting's purpose, the topics to cover with time for each, who owns each item, and what outcome you want — sent before the meeting so people can prepare. Write one and your meetings get shorter and sharper; skip it and they drift. Here's a simple method, plus templates for the meetings you run most.

What is a meeting agenda?

A meeting agenda is a short plan for a meeting: the goal, the list of topics in order, and roughly how long each gets. It does two jobs — it forces you to decide whether the meeting is even needed, and it lets attendees show up ready instead of cold. If you can't write an agenda, that's usually a sign the meeting should be an email.

How to write a meeting agenda, step by step

1. State the purpose in one sentence

"Decide the Q3 launch date" is a purpose. "Marketing sync" is not. If you can't name a clear outcome, reconsider the meeting.

2. List topics as questions or outcomes

Frame each item by what it should produce: "Agree on pricing tiers," not "Pricing." This tells everyone what done looks like.

3. Assign an owner and a time to each item

Every topic gets a person responsible for leading it and a rough number of minutes. Owners prevent silence; timeboxes prevent overrun.

4. Order by priority

Put the most important item first, while energy and attention are highest — not buried after fifteen minutes of updates.

5. Send it ahead of time

An agenda revealed in the meeting is useless for preparation. Send it with the invite, or paste it into the calendar event.

Free meeting agenda templates

Weekly team meeting

1:1 meeting

Project kickoff

How to add an agenda to a Teams or calendar meeting

Paste the agenda into the calendar event's description so it travels with the invite, drop it as the first message in the meeting chat, or attach it as a file. Step-by-step for Teams is in how to set up a Teams meeting.

From agenda to minutes, automatically

The agenda is the plan; the minutes are the record. They share a structure — and that's the point. Nod captures the meeting from your Mac's audio (no bot in the call) and produces topics, decisions, and action items with owners and due dates, so the agenda you wrote going in becomes a clean record coming out, with no manual write-up.

Capture is local on your Mac; transcription runs in the EU cloud with Zero Data Retention and no stored audio. See how to write meeting minutes for the other half of the workflow.