# Action Items > See everything people promised in your meetings, in one list. Source: https://groupthink.com/docs/action_items/ Last updated: 2026-09-25 Groupthink reads your meetings and notes for the things people promised each other, then puts them in two places: the **Action items** block at the bottom of a meeting recap, and **Action Items** in the sidebar, which gathers everything you owe across every meeting. Some promises are stated plainly. Others are phrased as an offer that somebody accepts a minute later. Groupthink now surfaces both, and it tells you which is which. ## Two kinds of action items | What you see | Where it comes from | What you do with it | | -------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------ | | A normal action item | A commitment stated directly, like "I will send the deck on Friday" | Check it off, edit it, give it a due date, route it | | A **Suggested** card | A softly phrased commitment, like "just let me know" or "I would love to" | **Accept** it in one tap, or **Dismiss** it in one tap | Suggestions sit below the confirmed items, under a **Suggested** heading that says we think these were promised and asks you to confirm or dismiss. Each card carries a **Suggested** badge and two buttons: - **Accept** promotes the card to a normal action item. It joins the list above and behaves like every other item, so you can check it off, set a due date, or route it. - **Dismiss** removes the card. A dismissed suggestion does not come back. Both actions take effect immediately. Nothing else happens to a suggestion until you decide, so an unaccepted suggestion is never counted as something you owe. ### Why suggestions exist People do not hand each other tickets. In a real conversation a commitment is usually an offer plus an acceptance: one person says "if you want, just let me know and I will sort it out," and the other says "yes, I would love that." Nobody in that exchange ever says the words "action item," but a promise was made and both people expect it to happen. Groupthink used to require a commitment to be stated outright before it would record one. On warm, relationship heavy calls that produced a blank list, which quietly told you nothing had been promised when in fact several things had. So instead of guessing, Groupthink shows you the softer ones and asks. A suggestion you did not want costs a single tap to dismiss. A promise the product never mentions costs you the promise. ## Items with no clear owner Sometimes the commitment is unmistakable but the owner is not. Groupthink used to drop those items entirely, which is why some real promises never appeared anywhere. Now the item stays and shows an **Unassigned** pill instead. Click the pill and pick an owner: - **Me** - Any person linked to the meeting, including [contacts who do not have a Groupthink account](/docs/linked_people) Groupthink never guesses. It does not quietly assign the item to whoever was recording. If the owner was not clear from the conversation, the item says so and waits for you to choose. ## What the empty state means now An empty action items block used to say "no action items," which asserted something Groupthink could not actually know. It now says what it really knows: - When nothing cleared the bar, the recap says **"Nothing we were confident about in this meeting."** - When you already reviewed suggestions and dismissed them, it tells you how many you dismissed rather than claiming the meeting produced nothing. - On **Action Items**, an empty list says you are all caught up, and a filtered list says that nothing matches the filters rather than that nothing exists. If a meeting shows nothing and you expected something, that is worth telling us about. It usually means the commitment was phrased in a way the extraction missed, and those cases are how the extraction gets better. ## Where action items appear ### On the meeting recap Open a meeting and scroll to the **Action items** block on the Summary tab. It holds the commitments from that one conversation: confirmed items first, then any suggestions. See [Ending a Meeting](/docs/ending_meetings) for the rest of what a recap contains. ### Action Items Click **Action Items** in the sidebar for everything you owe across all of your meetings. The list is grouped by due date (Overdue, Today, This week, Later, No due date) and you can: - Filter by status: **Open**, **Done**, or **Dropped** - Filter by due window: any time, overdue, due this week, due this month - Group by **Due date**, **Project**, or **Relationship** Suggestions from any meeting appear in their own **Suggested** section at the top of this view, so you can clear them in one pass rather than opening each recap. If the list is empty because you are new, a button offers to extract action items from your last 30 days of meetings. That runs once in the background and fills the list in place. ## What you can do with a confirmed item - Check it off when it is done, or uncheck it to reopen it - Edit the wording - Set or clear a due date - Assign an owner, or change one - Say who owes whom (see **Commitments** below) - Add or remove **project** and **person** chips (see below) - Route it to **GitHub issue**, **Linear**, **Watch**, **Private**, or **Drop**. See [GitHub Integration](/docs/github_integration) - Open the meeting recap it came from, for the context around it ### Editing an item's projects and people Every row on the Action Items list carries its project and person chips inline, and both are editable in place. Each chip has an **×** to remove it, and **+ Project** and **+ Person** add one. Changes save as you make them and survive a reload, so you can re-file a batch of items without opening a single recap. If you are grouped by **Project** or **Relationship**, the list re-groups as you go. ## Commitments: who owes whom, and closing the loop Some action items are a promise between two people rather than a task on a list, and Groupthink treats those differently. ### You owe / owes you When Groupthink can tell which direction a promise runs, the row says so next to the person's name: - **You owe Maya** — you promised Maya something - **Maya owes you** — Maya promised you something The label is a menu, so you can correct it. It offers **I owe them**, **They owe me**, and **Not a commitment**, which demotes the row back to an ordinary task. A plain task with no direction shows no label at all. ### Done is not the same as told Finishing something you owe someone and _telling them_ you finished it are two different acts, and only one of them is what the other person is waiting on. So when you check off an item you owe someone, the row does not simply disappear. It moves to a standing **Done, not yet told** section at the top of the Open view and carries a **Let Maya know** chip. Clicking that chip records that you told them, and the row clears. It then reads **Told Maya just now**, with an **×** to undo the click if you tapped it by mistake. Switch the status filter to **Done** and you can see the same thing on completed items. This second step only ever appears on a completed commitment that **you** owe someone. An ordinary task, an open item, and anything owed _to_ you are all still one click. Groupthink does not draft the message or nag you about it. It only points at the ones still waiting. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### A suggestion appeared that nobody actually promised. Is that a bug? No. Suggestions are the things Groupthink believes were probably promised but cannot state as fact. Dismiss it and it will not come back. That two second cost is the trade that lets Groupthink surface the softly worded promises it used to throw away. ### Can I turn suggestions off? Not today. They are clearly separated from confirmed items and never counted as things you owe until you accept them. ### Does accepting a suggestion change anything else? It becomes a normal action item. From that point it can be completed, given a due date, and routed to GitHub or Linear like any other. ### Are suggestions in the recap email? The Accept and Dismiss controls live in the app, so open the meeting recap page to review them. See [How to View Meeting Notes Shared With You](/docs/view_shared_meeting_notes). ### Does this work on a one to one call with someone who is not a Groupthink user? Yes. Action items and suggestions both work on calls with people outside your workspace, and you can assign an item to any person linked to the meeting. See [Linked People](/docs/linked_people). ### Does "Let them know" send anything? No. It records that you told them; it does not send an email, a message, or a notification. Groupthink surfaces which loops are still open and leaves the wording to you. ### Is this on the iPhone app? Yes. On your iPhone, open the **Overview** tab and tap the checklist icon at the top to see your action items. You can accept or dismiss suggestions and assign an owner to an unassigned item there. Marking an item done isn't on the iPhone yet, so do that on the web or in the desktop app. See [Your Daily Overview on iPhone](/docs/ios_daily_overview#action-items). ## Getting Help Questions about action items, or a promise Groupthink missed? Email [support@groupthink.com](mailto:support@groupthink.com).