Your Meeting Routine

The week that breaks every good intention

Everything in this course works. It also all falls apart on the Tuesday when you have five meetings, a train to catch and someone off sick.

That is the real test, and it is why this last lesson is not about better prompts. A routine survives a busy week only if it makes almost no demands on you in the moment. That means the decisions get made once, in advance, while you are calm, and what remains during the week is a handful of small mechanical steps you do without thinking about them.

So: fifteen minutes of setup, then two short checklists.

Do this once

Block fifteen minutes. You will not do this again.

Settle the policy question. Ask whoever handles data protection or compliance where you work what the position is on recording meetings and on AI tools. If nobody knows, ask your manager and write down the answer you were given, along with who gave it. This is the question from lesson two, and answering it once is what lets you stop worrying about it every week.

Feed the tool your vocabulary. If your notetaker accepts a list of names and terms, give it every colleague's name, your product names, your acronyms, your main clients and suppliers. This is the cheapest accuracy improvement available to you.

Write your standard prompt. Take the template from lesson three, adjust the section names to match how your team already works, and save it somewhere you can reach in two seconds: a pinned note, a text expander, wherever. If you have to rewrite it each time, you will stop using it by Thursday.

Write your disclosure line. One sentence for the invite, one for the top of the call, saved in the same place. Improvising this is the reason people skip it.

Decide where notes live and how long recordings stay. Recordings accumulate silently and each one is a small liability sitting in an account somebody could gain access to. Pick a rule now: keep the written notes, delete the recording and transcript once the notes are agreed, unless there is a specific reason to keep them. Then actually apply it.

Before the meeting: thirty seconds

Four questions, and three of them are usually instant.

1. Should this be recorded at all? Performance, grievance, health, redundancy, anything sensitive about a named person: no notetaker. Close the laptop and write four lines by hand.
2. Is the value going to be visual? A whiteboard or design session produces a transcript full of "this" and "that". Record it if you like, but plan to photograph the board.
3. Is anyone external joining? Then the disclosure goes in the invite, in writing, before the day.
4. What do I actually want out of this? Actions, a decision record, or a version for a client. Knowing this before you start takes a second and shapes what you ask for afterwards.

During: ten seconds

Say the line. Flat tone, same words every time, no apology in your voice.

If anybody objects, switch it off, say out loud that it is off, and carry on with a notepad. That is the whole of the during phase.

After: five minutes, today

This is the part with a deadline attached, and the deadline is today.

1. Paste the transcript into your saved prompt.
2. Read the ambiguous or needs-confirming list first. Those items are thirty second messages now and archaeology next week.
3. Run the ninety second check from lesson five: names, attribution, decisions, owners and dates, numbers.
4. Send it, with one line asking for corrections and flagging what you marked as unconfirmed.
5. Apply your retention rule.

The weekly sweep is the one people skip and then miss. Open the last week of notes, look at every action still marked UNASSIGNED or NO DATE, and either give it a name and a date or delete it. An action list nobody prunes stops being read within a month, and then the whole habit quietly dies.

When it is not your meeting

You will often be in somebody else's call with somebody else's bot in it. Three things are worth knowing.

You are allowed to ask what the recording is for and where the notes go. It is a reasonable question and asking it politely costs nothing. You are also allowed to say you would rather not be recorded, and a decent organiser will simply turn it off. And you should assume, in any recorded meeting, that your words are going into a document you will never see and cannot correct, which is a good reason to say the thing you mean rather than the thing you would half say.

If notes arrive afterwards from someone else's tool and they misquote you, correct it in the thread that day. Politely, briefly, and without making it a thing. Uncontested notes become the record, and the record outlives everybody's memory of the meeting.

Where to go next

Meetings are one slice of a bigger habit, and the neighbouring courses pick up where this one stops.

AI Productivity at Work covers the wider workday: email, documents, planning, and turning rough notes into actions when there was no recording at all.

AI Safety, Privacy and Verification goes properly into what happens to text you paste into a tool, how to think about confidential material, and how to check things that sound true.

AI for Managers and Team Leads is the one to take if you run the meetings rather than just attend them, since most of the consent and record keeping questions in this course land on whoever called the meeting.