Meetings, minus the amnesia.
The meeting itself is a fraction of the work — prep before, capture during, follow-through after is where hours vanish. ChatGPT compresses all three. Playbook below.
01 Before: walk in loaded
Ten minutes of AI-assisted prep beats an hour of unassisted scrambling. Paste the agenda, the email thread that caused the meeting, or last time's minutes, and run:
- "What are the three decisions this meeting actually needs to produce?"
- "What's likely to be contentious, and what's my strongest position on each?"
- "Draft the questions I should ask [person] given what they said in this thread."
For meetings you run: "Turn this into a one-page brief — context, decisions needed, options with tradeoffs." Send it the day before. This one habit shortens meetings more than any tool, because the arguing starts from a document instead of from zero.
02 During: capture ugly, clean later
Don't write pretty notes in the meeting — be present and capture fragments: decisions, numbers, names, "J owns pricing by Fri." If the meeting is recorded or transcribed (Teams, Zoom, Meet all do this now), even better: the transcript is your raw material. On a walk-and-talk or site visit? Voice-memo the debrief to yourself in the parking lot — sixty seconds of rambling is plenty.
OpenAI's release notes say you can now attach an audio file to a ChatGPT conversation, then ask for a transcript, a summary, or answers about the recording, for example turning a meeting, interview, or lecture into structured notes or a follow-up email draft. Availability is for paid ChatGPT subscriptions and workspaces; OpenAI notes it may vary by workspace settings, region, client version, and model, and it does not publish file-size or length limits in that entry. It also warns that transcripts may contain errors and that performance varies by language, so check names, numbers, and commitments against your own fragments before sending anything.
03 After: the five-minute close
That last point is quietly political: the person who sends the recap defines the meeting. ChatGPT makes you always fast enough to be that person.
04 The running record
Keep a Project per recurring meeting (see Projects). Drop each week's minutes in. Now you can ask: "What did we say about hiring across the last month?" "Which action items from previous weeks never closed?" A meeting series with searchable memory stops repeating itself — mostly.
Find your notes or transcript from the last meeting you attended. Run the extraction prompt. Compare against what you thought the action items were.
Open ChatGPT →This week's challenge
For every meeting this week: one-page brief before (if it's yours), fragments during, five-minute close after — and be the one who sends the recap. Friday, ask ChatGPT to compile every action item from the week into one list. That list is your Monday.