templates
Meeting parking lot template — park the good idea, keep the meeting, and actually come back to it
Every meeting gets one: a good idea at the wrong time. Chase it and the agenda dies. Shut it down and the person who raised it stops raising things. The parking lot is the middle path. Write it down where everyone can see it, promise to come back to it, and move on. Atlassian's facilitation guide puts it simply: offer to create a "parking lot" and jot it down "so you can come back to it later."
The hard part isn't parking things. It's coming back.
The template
| # | Parked item | Raised by | Meeting | Why it matters | Next step | Owner | Back by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Should the free plan include video storage? | Priya | Pricing review, 4 Nov | Changes the upgrade path | 15-minute slot at next pricing review | Priya | 11 Nov |
| 2 | Customers keep asking for a Slack summary | Sam | Weekly sync, 4 Nov | Third time this month | Sam pulls the requests into one doc | Sam | 7 Nov |
| 3 | Rename the "Workspace" tab? | Jordan | Design crit, 3 Nov | Low. Cosmetic | Async poll in the design channel | Jordan | 10 Nov |
Paste it into the shared agenda doc, so the parking lot travels with the meeting series instead of dying in one meeting's notes.
When to park something
Park it when it's worth discussing but not in this meeting:
- It needs someone who isn't in the room.
- It needs data nobody has yet.
- It's bigger than the time left.
- It's a different meeting's job, like a pricing idea in a design review.
Don't park a decision this meeting was called to make. That's not parking, it's avoiding. And don't park something just to end an argument you're uncomfortable with. People can tell, and they stop trusting the lot.
The one rule: every parked item leaves with an owner and a date
A parking lot with no owners is a graveyard with good intentions. Before the meeting ends, go down the list and give each item one of three fates:
- A slot. It goes on a named future agenda, with a date.
- An owner and a next step. Someone does the small thing that makes it discussable, like pulling data or asking the person who wasn't there.
- Dropped, out loud. "We're not going to do this, and that's fine" is a legitimate outcome. Say it in the meeting so the person who raised it hears it.
Then review the lot at the start of the next meeting in the series. It takes two minutes, and it's what makes people believe that parking means later, not never.
Parking lot vs open questions vs action items
- Parking lot: good topics that weren't on this agenda.
- Open questions: things this meeting tried to settle and couldn't.
- Action items: work somebody committed to.
Keep them in separate lists. When they blur, parked ideas get mistaken for commitments, and the decision log fills up with things nobody decided.
Letting the room keep the list
In Meetful, the AI in the room keeps live notes as you talk: decisions, open questions and actions, each with the exact words they came from and the name of whoever said them. So "let's park that" doesn't need a volunteer note-taker. Afterwards the recap shows what was raised and left open, quoted, and you decide which items go in the parking lot. Free, no time limit on calls, no account needed to start a meeting.
Read next
Sources
- Atlassian, How to manage meetings like an expert facilitator, section "Create a 'parking lot' for good ideas that distract"