Meetings: before, during, after

A one-hour meeting is one hour of talking and, done properly, another forty minutes of work nobody budgets: the agenda beforehand, the notes during, the minutes and follow-ups after. That forty minutes is almost entirely text work, which means almost all of it can be delegated. Meetings are where Priya reclaims her first full hour of the week.

Before: the agenda is a two-minute job

An agenda is a small structured document generated from facts you already know — which is the exact shape of task the assistant does perfectly:

Draft an agenda for a 45-minute vendor review meeting. Attendees: me
(ops head), our procurement lead, the vendor's account manager.
Goal: get delivery reliability back above 95% without reopening the
contract. Touchy point: their last two invoices disputed. I want the
reliability discussion to get most of the time.

The output allocates minutes per item, sequences the touchy invoice item after the collaborative reliability discussion, and adds a "decisions needed" closer she wouldn't have thought to include. Send it the day before and you have also quietly raised the odds the meeting stays on topic — agendas do that, which is why nobody skips them on purpose, only from friction.

During: notes with consent

As of mid-2026, every major meeting platform can transcribe or summarize a call, and standalone recorder tools go further. Two rules before you touch any of them. Consent first — announce recording and get agreement; in many places this is law, and in every place it is respect. Policy second — a meeting transcript is often the most sensitive document your company produces all day (candid assessments, client names, numbers), so where that recording is stored and processed is a real question; lesson 11's rules apply with full force. If recording is off the table, the low-tech fallback works better than people expect: type rough fragments as the meeting runs — half-sentences, names, numbers — and let the after-step below turn them into prose. Your fragments plus the model's structure beats your memory plus a blank page every time.

After: from mess to minutes

This is the payoff. Priya's actual notes from Friday's review are genuinely messy — "RK says nashik cert 'this week' (3rd time) / escalate if not fri / 94% otd, target 95 / anjali owns driver hiring update next wk / disputed invoices — sep call, don't mix" — and the ask is:

Turn these rough notes into meeting minutes. Format: decisions made,
action items (owner + deadline each), open questions. Anything you
can't place, put under open questions rather than guessing.

The result is minutes she can circulate in five minutes flat, with the crucial instruction being the last line — put it under open questions rather than guessing — because a model asked to produce tidy minutes will otherwise tidy the gaps too, and an invented deadline in circulated minutes is a small disaster. Note the pattern, because it recurs everywhere: you route the model's uncertainty somewhere visible instead of letting it dissolve into confident prose.

Follow-ups fall out for free: "draft the escalation email to RK's manager we agreed on, referencing the three missed commitments" — grounded in the notes it just processed, in the same conversation, thirty more seconds.

Do this today: find the notes from your last meeting — however fragmentary — and run the minutes ask. If they became minutes already, run it anyway and compare what the model caught and what it missed; that comparison teaches you its texture faster than any lesson can.