Following Up on Action Items
How action items flow through their status lifecycle — pending, in_progress, done — and how to track completion across meetings.
The Status Lifecycle
Every action item moves through three statuses: pending (the default when extracted), in_progress (you're actively working on it), and done (completed). Status changes are cheap — tell your AI employee "mark the SOW action item as in progress" or "the Figma credentials action is done now" and it updates the record with a timestamp. Notes can be added at any point — "mark the SOW action as done — sent the revised version this morning, waiting on their signature" — so the history of each action item is preserved, not overwritten.
The three-status model is intentionally minimal. If you need richer state (blocked, waiting-on-someone, cancelled), use the notes field — the AI can filter and search notes when you ask ("show me every action item blocked on the client").
Cross-Meeting Views
Action items accumulate across every meeting you process, so you typically care about them in the aggregate more than per-meeting. Ask your AI employee for "every open action item across all my meetings" and it returns the full pending list with meeting titles and dates. Filter by status ("show me everything I've marked in-progress"), by assignee ("all open action items on my plate"), or by timeframe ("actions from meetings in the last two weeks"). This is the closest thing to an inbox for meeting follow-ups.
Weekly review of open action items
Sweep every open action from the past week.
Proactive Reminders
Action items with deadlines surface automatically in your daily briefings — the evening summary will flag anything due tomorrow or anything overdue, and the morning briefing will list the day's open action items. You can also set explicit reminders on any individual action ("remind me about the SOW follow-up on Thursday morning"), which create a standalone reminder tied to the action. Reminders land in Telegram at the configured time with a link back to the action item and its meeting context.
Closing the Loop
Once an action item is done, marking it done removes it from the "open" views but preserves it in the meeting's history. If the same action item has spawned follow-on work (sent the SOW → now waiting on signature → now scheduling the kickoff), create a new action item for the follow-on rather than re-opening the closed one. This keeps the history clean — every done action is a completed commitment, not a conversation that rolled forward under the same line.
Done action items are still searchable. "What did I commit to do about the Q1 audit?" will find the action even if you already marked it done — the context lives on in the meeting record.