Action Items

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.

Summary

• 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.
• A softly phrased promise shows as a Suggested card. Accept it or Dismiss it in one tap. See Two kinds of action items.
• A promise with no clear owner shows an Unassigned pill. Click it and pick an owner. See Items with no clear owner.
• A promise you owe someone has two steps: done, and told. See Done is not the same as told.
• Why suggestions exist, what the empty state means and the FAQ, including the iPhone app, are in Reference.

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 for the rest of what a recap contains.

You can change the items here if you were in the meeting, or if you are a Host or Participant on its agenda. If you can open the meeting but are neither, for example you have the link to it or you are a Viewer who was not in it, the items show with no checkbox, buttons or menus, and the block says You can read these, but only people who were in this meeting or are on its series can change them. Ask the meeting's host to add you. "Its series" means the agenda.

An item that is your own keeps its controls. When only some of the items are yours, the block says You can change the items that are yours. The rest can only be changed by people who were in this meeting or are on its series. See Managing Agenda Permissions.

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 above the rest of your items, just under Done, not yet told when you have any, so you can clear them in one pass rather than opening each recap.

If the list is empty, the Extract action items from your last 30 days button looks back over your recent meetings and notes. That runs once in the background and fills the list in place. On a new account with no meetings yet, the page asks you to connect a calendar or paste a recent meeting's notes instead.

On a person's page

Open someone from Relationships and scroll to Commitments, just under Open threads. It shows what was promised between the two of you, from meetings and from notes:

• You owe Sam: things you said you would do for them
• Sam owes you: things they said they would do for you
• Not sure who owes whom: promises where Groupthink could not tell the direction

In each group, open ones come first, then done ones with a grey check. Under each one is where and when it was said, like "From Weekly sync · Sep 12" or "From a note · Sep 20". A done one you owed and already told them about also says when, like "Told Sam 2 days ago".

Some things are left out on purpose:

• Second-hand promises. If someone else told you that Sam promised something, it stays off Sam's page. It is still on the Action Items list.
• Suggestions you have not accepted yet. Accept one and it appears here.
• Dismissed items.

There are no scores, counts or overdue markers. It is your own record of what was said, shown back to you. To mark one done, record that you told them, or change who owes whom, use Action Items or the meeting recap.

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.

Under its text, a card can show two more things to help you decide:

• The words that were said. A short quote, in quotation marks, from the transcript or note. Groupthink only shows a quote after checking that those words appear in the source. A card with no quote is still a real suggestion. It means Groupthink had no quote it could match to the source. In that case the card may show a line starting with Why: instead, with Groupthink's one sentence reason for who it tied the item to. It is not a quote.
• Where it came from. One line with the person it involves, the name of the meeting or capture, and the date, like "You owe Cynthia · Weekly 1:1 with Cynthia · Aug 19". Click the meeting name to open its recap, or a capture's name to open Conversations. Click the person's name to open their page.

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.

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

When the item does not yet say who owes whom, picking an owner fills that in too: pick Me and it shows as something you owe, pick a person and it shows as something they owe you. If that is wrong, change it from the label (see Commitments below).

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 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 Watch, GitHub issue, Linear, Private, or Drop, or hand it to ChatGPT from the same Route menu. See GitHub Integration
• Open the meeting recap it came from, for the context around it

Items handed to your assistant

If Groupthink is connected to an AI assistant (see MCP Server), you can ask the assistant to take an action item on itself, for example "add the follow-up with Sam to my action items and take it on yourself." The item then shows a Your assistant chip with a robot icon where the route would be. Hover it and it reads Routed to Your assistant.

The item stays open on your list until it is checked off, by you in Groupthink or by your assistant. It is also filed under the assistant by name (Claude Code, Codex or ChatGPT), so asking your assistant what is on its plate brings it back. Click the × on the chip to put the item back to unrouted.

The Route menu does not offer Your assistant as a choice yet. Handing an item over happens from your assistant. The ChatGPT choice under Hand to your assistant in that menu is a different thing: it opens ChatGPT with a prompt and leaves the item unrouted.

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 and how long ago, like "Told Maya a few seconds ago", 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.

While a row reads Told Maya, who owes it is locked: you can't change You owe to They owe me or Not a commitment, or change its owner. The mark is your record that you told them, so Groupthink won't remove it for you. If the row has the wrong person or the wrong direction, click the × on Told Maya to mark it as not told, make the change, then tell them again if that still applies. A done item you never marked as told can be changed freely.

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.

Reference

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.

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:

• While Groupthink is still reading the meeting, the block says commitments will appear when it finishes.
• If Groupthink could not finish reading the meeting, the block says so and warns that the list may be incomplete.
• 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 No open action items and offers to look back over your last 30 days, and a filtered list says No action items match these 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.

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.

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 who do not use Groupthink, and you can assign an item to any person linked to the meeting. See 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 Today tab and tap the checklist icon at the top to see your action items. You can accept or dismiss suggestions, assign an owner to an unassigned item, and mark items done there. Today also lists your tasks for the day under your meetings, each with a Clear button. See Action items on iPhone.

Getting Help

Questions about action items, or a promise Groupthink missed? Email support@groupthink.com.