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."

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.

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.