Advanced meeting recaps

The honest baseline at most companies is that the typical meeting produces no written artifact at all. The conversation happens, people walk out with their own mental version, and within 48 hours half of what was said is gone. Nobody decides this. It’s the default that wins when nobody pushes back. The second-most-common state is barely better: an over-long block of notes that nobody reads, or a one-line “we met about X” calendar comment that conveys nothing. The recap exists in form but not in function. This is the workflow you reach for when you don’t have a specialized template, don’t need one, and want a clean recap. It is the lightest workflow in the workflows series — and the most likely to be used when something more specialized would have been better. This guide covers both: how to do advanced meeting recaps well, and how to know when to graduate. This guide is a specific instance of the workflows pattern.

Match the recap to the audience

Even an advanced meeting recap is for someone. Be honest about who:

Audience	Use template	Typical length
Yourself only	Personal notes	200–400 words
One colleague who missed it	Catch-me-up	300–500 words
Slack channel or DM with quick context	Standard recap	150–350 words
Slack reply to “how did it go?”	TL;DR	5 lines
A broader audience that wasn’t in the room	Use the shareable summaries workflow instead	—

Recap length should be inversely related to how much your reader cares. Counter-intuitive but true: the reader who already cares (this is their project, their team) can pull the full notes if they want; the reader who’s curious wants the TL;DR. People over-write recaps far more often than they under-write them.

The four templates

TL;DR

For when you want only the bottom line. Often used as a Slack reply to “how did it go?”

Produce a 5-line TL;DR of this meeting.

Constraints:
- 5 lines maximum
- Line 1: the headline — the most important outcome
- Lines 2–4: the substance of the meeting in compressed form
- Line 5: what's next (a decision pending, a follow-up, the next meeting)
- No emojis, no preamble, no padding

The 5-line cap is the discipline. If you can’t fit the meeting into 5 lines, the meeting needs the standard recap below.

Standard recap

The workhorse. Use when you don’t know which template you need.

Produce a clean recap of this meeting.

Constraints:
- 150–350 words
- Headline on the first line: the most important outcome or topic
- Organized by topic, not chronologically
- Include decisions, action items, and open questions if any
- No emojis, no filler, no pleasantries
- Be honest about what was actually said — do not infer or embellish

Format:
**{Headline}**

**What we discussed:** Two to four sentences on the substance.

**Decisions:**
- {Decision} — context if needed
- "None" if no decisions were made.

**Action items:**
- {Owner} — {what} — by {when}
- "None" if no action items.

**Open questions:**
- {Question raised but not resolved}
- "None" if nothing is open.

**What's next:**
- One to two lines on the next step or next meeting.

This is the template most users should reach for by default. Flexible enough to work for almost any meeting, structured enough to be useful, short enough to read.

Catch-me-up

For someone who missed the meeting and needs to know what happened. Slightly longer because the reader has zero context to start.

Produce a recap of this meeting for someone who was not there and needs
to be brought up to speed.

Constraints:
- 300–500 words
- Opens with one to two sentences of context (what the meeting was,
  who was there, what it was for)
- Walks through what happened in enough detail that the reader could
  hold an informed conversation
- Captures decisions, action items, and open threads
- Notes anything the absent reader specifically needs to know — items
  assigned to them, commitments made on their behalf, questions raised
  about their work
- No emojis

Format:
**Catch-up: {Meeting Name} — YYYY-MM-DD**

**Context:** One to two sentences on what this meeting was and why.
Who was there.

**Main topics:**
For each major topic:
- **{Topic}:** Two to four sentences on what was discussed, what
  positions emerged, where it landed.

**Decisions made:**
- {Decision} — context

**Action items:**
- {Owner} — {what} — by {when}

**Items relevant to you specifically:**
If anything was raised about the absent reader's work, commitments were
made on their behalf, or items were assigned to them.
- {Item}

**Open questions / what's still being worked through:**
- {Question}

**What's next:**
- Next meeting, follow-up calls, deadlines.

The Items relevant to you specifically section is the distinguishing feature. A catch-me-up that calls out the reader’s stake explicitly is dramatically more useful than one that doesn’t.

Personal notes

For your own reference. Written for one reader: future you.

Produce a personal recap of this meeting for my own reference. The
audience is me; the goal is to capture what I personally need to
remember and act on.

Constraints:
- 200–400 words
- Focused on what I said, committed to, and need to follow up on
- Captures useful context for my own work going forward
- Honest about my own moments in the call I want to remember
- No emojis

Format:
**My recap: {Meeting Name} — YYYY-MM-DD**

**The point of the meeting:** One sentence.

**What happened (substance):** Three to five sentences on what was
discussed and where it landed.

**What I committed to:**
- {What} — by {when}

**What others committed to (that affects me):**
- {Owner} — {what} — by {when}

**What I want to remember:**
Specific things from the conversation worth holding onto — a useful
framing someone offered, a piece of information I didn't know, a
question I should sit with, a person to follow up with.

**What I want to do differently next time:**
Self-coaching note. Anything I'd handle differently? Skip if nothing
comes up.

**Follow-ups I need to initiate:**
- {Action} — by {when}

The What I want to remember and What I want to do differently sections are what make this template worth using over the standard recap for personal use. They turn a recap into a small reflective artifact that compounds across calls.

Save them as private templates

Start with the Standard recap

For most users, this is the only template they need. Paste the prompt into a new task in the Composer, run on a real meeting, iterate until the output is reliably useful.

Add the others as you need them

Most users end up with two saved templates: Standard recap and one of the others (often Catch-me-up or Personal notes). Don’t save all four if you’ll only use two.

Save with Private visibility

Advanced meeting recaps are usually a personal habit, not a team standard. Private visibility is the right default. See Custom templates.

Run it on a single meeting

Pick a template — or default to Standard

Based on audience. If you can’t decide, use Standard.

Run it

The output appears in seconds. Read it once.

The 60-second check

For advanced meeting recaps, the cleanup pass is much shorter than for structured workflows. Three things to verify:

Is the headline right? If the first line isn’t the most important thing about the meeting, fix it.
Are there hallucinations? Skim for anything that doesn’t match what actually happened. Cut.
Vague qualifiers? “The team was excited” — either back it up with a specific or cut it.

Sixty seconds. If you’re spending five minutes on cleanup, you needed a structured template, not an advanced meeting recap.

Share or file

Send it to whoever needs it (Slack DM, channel, email) or leave it in Earmark as the meeting’s artifact. There’s no fourth step for advanced meeting recaps; the workflow ends here.

Hallucinated action items are the most common failure mode. The model sometimes assigns todos to whoever spoke most or last when no assignment was actually made. Read the action-items line carefully.

When to graduate to a specialized workflow

This is the most important section of the page. An advanced meeting recap is the right tool for many things and the wrong tool for many others. Signs you should graduate — any of these means you’re using the wrong tool:

You’re running the same advanced meeting recap on the same recurring meeting every week. That’s a structured-notes workflow waiting to happen. Set up the template once; let it do the work going forward.
The recap needs to flow into a system of record. Advanced meeting recaps don’t have the shape your CRM, ATS, Linear, or research repo wants.
You’re routinely cleaning up the recap to extract specific things. If every advanced meeting recap on a sales call gets pulled apart by hand for MEDDPICC dimensions, the sales calls workflow saves that work.
The same audience reads the recap on a cadence. A leadership team reading your recap every Friday wants a leadership digest, not a meeting recap. Use the leadership readouts workflow.
The content is sensitive. 1:1s, candidate interviews, and comp conversations need the consent and confidentiality discipline of the specialized workflows.

The meeting-type-to-workflow map:

If the meeting is…	Use this instead
A recurring team meeting with continuity needs	Structured meeting notes
A customer interview or user research call	Customer research workflow
A sales call (discovery, demo, negotiation)	Sales calls workflow
A 1:1, performance check-in, or candidate interview	People and team meetings workflow or hiring workflow
Something requiring an audience-shaped summary	Shareable summaries workflow
Something requiring a leadership-facing artifact	Leadership readouts workflow
Something where the action items are what you need	Action items workflow
A one-off question against a single past call	Ad-hoc Q&A

The rule of thumb: if the meeting produces work the organization needs later, use a structured workflow. If the meeting produces knowledge a person needs in the next 48 hours, an advanced meeting recap is usually enough. Equally important: don’t over-engineer. A common failure is reading all the workflow guides and concluding everything needs a specialized template. Many things don’t. The advanced meeting recap is enough most of the time:

The meeting is one-off
The audience is you alone, or one colleague
You need something quick and the stakes are low
You’re not yet sure whether the meeting type will recur
The structured workflow’s overhead isn’t justified by the value

The graduation move

When you notice you’re running the same advanced meeting recap repeatedly on the same meeting type, the move is straightforward:

Read the corresponding specialized workflow guide
Save the relevant template as a workspace or private template
Pre-seed it on the next instance of that meeting (often via the calendar series)
Run the new workflow for two weeks before deciding whether it’s an upgrade

Most graduations are obvious within two weeks. Either the specialized template is producing materially more value, or it isn’t and you go back to advanced meeting recaps. Either answer is fine; the experiment is cheap.

Common pitfalls

Using advanced meeting recap when a structured workflow is the right tool. The most common mistake. If you’re doing the same manual cleanup repeatedly, graduate.
Skipping the 60-second check. The check is fast but not optional. The model occasionally hallucinates, smooths over disagreement, or invents a confident headline.
Over-writing. Advanced meeting recaps suffer more from being too long than too short. Hold the constraints in the template.
Treating the recap as a durable record. An advanced meeting recap is not a decision log, an action item list in your task system, or a CRM note. If the content needs to survive past next week with structure, route it deliberately or use a specialized workflow.
Generating recaps for meetings that didn’t need one. Quick syncs, broadcasts, brainstorms — sometimes there’s nothing useful to capture. Generating a recap “because I always do” produces noise.
Hallucinated action items. The model sometimes assigns todos to whoever spoke most or last when no assignment was made. Read the action-items line carefully.
Advanced meeting recap as substitute for being present. The point is to free you to be present, not to absent yourself from the meeting. The recap is downstream of attention, not a replacement.
Hoarding recaps as proof of work. The recap is for retrieval, not for filing. If you’re never going back to a recap, you don’t need to keep it.

Where to go next

Workflows — the general shape this is the lightest instance of
Custom templates — for saving the templates above
Composer — the surface where recap generation actually runs
Command menu — for finding past recaps with full-text search
The full specialized workflow set:
- Structured meeting notes — when recurring meetings need continuity
- Action items — when the recap is mostly the todos
- Shareable summaries — when audience-aware sharing is the point
- Customer research — for discovery and user-research calls
- Sales calls — for discovery, demo, and deal calls
- People and team meetings — for 1:1s, skip-levels, candidate interviews, standups
- Hiring — for the systematic version of interview evaluation
- Leadership readouts — for weekly digests, business reviews, board pre-reads, decision memos
- Ad-hoc Q&A — for asking questions of any meeting in your workspace

Documentation Index

​Match the recap to the audience

​The four templates

​TL;DR

​Standard recap

​Catch-me-up

​Personal notes

​Save them as private templates

​Run it on a single meeting

​When to graduate to a specialized workflow

​The graduation move

​Common pitfalls

​Where to go next

Match the recap to the audience

The four templates

TL;DR

Standard recap

Catch-me-up

Personal notes

Save them as private templates

Run it on a single meeting

When to graduate to a specialized workflow

The graduation move

Common pitfalls

Where to go next