There’s a quiet pattern across most knowledge work. Meetings happen and get captured. The capture creates a growing archive — every customer call, every 1:1, every project meeting. Users invest in the capture; few invest in the retrieval. The result is an archive that’s mostly write-only. You put meetings in; you rarely pull them out. Meanwhile, the next meeting is starting in 15 minutes. You’re rushing between calls. You have a vague sense of the topic and the participants. The calendar description is sparse or empty. You walk in and spend the first three minutes reconstructing context: “Where were we last time?” “Did we ever resolve that thing about the integration?” “What did you commit to follow up on?” The meeting starts cold; momentum is rebuilt from scratch every time. This workflow inverts the direction of every other workflow in this guide series. Instead of capturing what happened in a meeting, it uses your captured archive to prepare you before the next one. The captured corpus stops being a write-only backstop and becomes an active operating substrate for every meeting you take. This guide is a specific instance of the workflows pattern, applied prospectively. It’s the systematic, scheduled-before-every-meeting use of the ad-hoc Q&A capability — the same query layer, with templates and a habit around it.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tryearmark.com/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
What works today and what doesn’t
Worth being precise about up front, because this workflow is more cross-meeting-dependent than any other in the series. Single-call briefings work directly. If your prep needs context from one specific prior meeting — “what did we discuss in our call last Tuesday?” — the Composer on that prior meeting gives you a usable briefing in seconds. Real today, no workaround needed. Multi-call briefings use the manual workaround. If your prep needs synthesis across many prior meetings — “what’s open across our last three calls with this customer?” — that’s the cross-meeting Q&A capability covered in the ad-hoc Q&A page. Earmark refines artifacts within a single meeting today; multi-meeting briefings require manual context assembly: use the command menu (Cmd+K / Ctrl+K) to find the relevant prior calls; paste the artifacts (or transcript excerpts) from each into a Customize-context document; run the briefing template against the assembled corpus.
The morning sweep takes 10–15 minutes. For users who run briefings on every substantive meeting, the morning sweep — generate all the day’s briefings at once — is the practical pattern. Each briefing is 60–90 seconds of assembly plus a 30-second model run. Five briefings before a packed day works.
For very large corpora (every customer call across two years for a renewal conversation), exporting local transcripts and running an external agent is the alternative to manual assembly.
The rest of this guide is built around these mechanics. The workflow is fully usable today; the multi-call cases require the manual workaround the rest of the series has documented.
Foundation
Light setup compared to other workflows.Which meetings warrant prep
Not every meeting needs a briefing. The meetings that actually benefit:| Meeting type | Run the workflow? | Template |
|---|---|---|
| Recurring customer call (CSM, AE) | Yes — primary use case | A |
| Recurring 1:1 with a report | Yes — high leverage | B |
| Skip-level you don’t meet weekly | Yes — context decays between sessions | B |
| Peer 1:1 (cross-functional alignment) | Yes — especially if monthly or less | B |
| Sales follow-up or evaluation meeting | Yes — context matters intensely | A |
| Renewal / QBR with a customer | Yes — high-stakes; needs full history | A + multi-meeting synthesis |
| Investor call (recurring) | Yes — investor remembers; you should too | B (adapted) |
| Hiring loop interview where you’re not first | Yes — read prior interviewer artifacts | A (adapted) |
| Covering for a colleague | Yes — primary handoff use case | C |
| Onboarding into a project mid-stream | Yes — synthesize across project meetings | D (adapted) |
| First-time call with new party | No prior context to draw on | — |
| Brainstorms with the same internal team | Optional — only if it builds on prior work | — |
| All-hands, town halls, standups | No | — |
When to prep
Briefings have a useful window. Too early and you’ll forget by meeting time; too late and you’re scrambling. The sweet spot: 5–30 minutes before the meeting. Practical patterns:- Between meetings. If you have back-to-back meetings, run the briefing as the previous one ends. Sixty seconds to assemble; one minute to read; into the next meeting prepped.
- Morning sweep. For meetings happening later in the day, do a sweep first thing in the morning. Briefings ready to glance at right before each meeting.
- End-of-day prep for next morning. For the first one or two meetings of the next day, prep at end of today.
- On demand. When meetings move or new ones drop in, run the briefing in the moment.
Organize the corpus for retrieval
The briefing queries your captured archive. Better organization produces sharper briefings.- Name meetings consistently. “Customer X — Weekly check-in” beats “Meeting.” Cmd+K uses titles to find relevant prior calls.
- Tag meetings by relationship. Customer name, project name, person name. Tags make the query efficient.
- Keep identifiers consistent. Don’t switch between “Acme” and “Acme Corp” and “Acme, Inc.” — the model handles small variations but consistency helps.
- Use Earmark’s standard organizational features. Whatever your version of folders, projects, or accounts is, use it consistently.
Ownership
Each briefing has one owner: you, the person who’ll be in the meeting. There’s no shared ownership model because the briefing is for one person’s preparation. For coverage and handoff scenarios, the person being briefed is the consumer; the regular owner generates the briefing.The four templates
Each template includes the manual workaround instructions in its preamble — “assemble prior call artifacts into Customize context, then run this prompt.”Template A — Account or customer briefing
For sales calls, CSM check-ins, customer review meetings, and any recurring conversation with an external party. The workhorse for customer-facing roles.Template B — 1:1 / direct report briefing
For managers prepping for their next 1:1 with a report.Template C — Handoff / coverage briefing
For when you’re covering for a colleague (or being covered for). The audience is someone walking into a meeting cold; the briefing has to do the work of catching them up.Template D — Recurring meeting refresh
For ongoing internal meetings (weekly leadership sync, recurring project meeting, monthly cross-functional). The cadence is recurring; the briefing primes you on what’s recently happened.Save them as private templates
Start with the template you'll use most
For sales and CS: Template A. For managers: Template B. For internal team leads: Template D. For anyone whose colleagues take PTO: Template C. Save the most-used first.
Save with Private visibility
Briefings are personal prep, not team standards. Private visibility is the right default. Templates can be exported and shared when standing up handoff scenarios. See Custom templates.
Practice the workaround once
Before relying on the workflow daily, run it once end-to-end on a real upcoming meeting: Cmd+K to find the prior calls; paste relevant sections into Customize context on a new task; run the briefing template. Notice the friction of the assembly step; that’s where most of the per-briefing time goes.
Running the workflow before a single meeting
Pick the template
Match to the meeting type. A for customer/account, B for 1:1s, C for coverage scenarios, D for recurring internal.
Assemble the source material
For single-call briefings: open the prior call’s artifact directly and run the Composer on it.For multi-call briefings: use Cmd+K to find the relevant prior meetings (search by customer name, person name, project name); copy the relevant sections from each into a Customize-context document on a new task. The assembly takes 60–90 seconds for most briefings. For large corpora (renewal preparation across two years of customer history), export local transcripts and run an external agent.
Scan, don't read
The briefing is a tool for priming, not a document for reading. Sixty seconds of scanning is usually enough. Headlines, bullets, verbatim quotes — close it, walk in.
Building the briefing habit
The workflow’s value depends entirely on consistency. A briefing run before half your meetings is dramatically less useful than briefings run before all of them, because the asymmetric advantage erodes when the practice is inconsistent. The trigger. For most users, the trigger is the calendar. Every recurring meeting on tomorrow’s calendar gets a briefing today; every meeting today gets a briefing in the 5–30 minute window before it. The morning sweep. A useful pattern for managers and executives with packed days: a 15-minute morning sweep where you generate briefings for every substantive meeting on the day’s calendar. Briefings sit ready; you scan each one in the minute before the meeting starts. The morning sweep prevents the failure mode of “I’ll prep right before the meeting” — which collapses when meetings run long and you’re walking in cold to the next one. The between-meeting rhythm. For users in back-to-back meetings, the briefing becomes part of the transition: meeting ends, briefing for next meeting runs, scan briefing while walking to the next room, meeting starts. The 60-second transition is enough. The “skip prep” check. For meetings you’d normally skip prep for, ask: would 30 seconds of preparation make this meeting better? If yes, run the briefing. The exception is highly repetitive meetings where the prior context is in your head — daily standups with the same team, twice-weekly status checks. The compounding effect. A user running this workflow for a quarter accumulates noticeable effects: relationships feel deeper because they reference specifics from prior interactions; commitments carry forward reliably; meetings move faster because the cold-start cost is eliminated. By a year in, the user is operating at a different level than peers who run the same meetings without the workflow.Coverage and handoff scenarios
The single most underrated application of this workflow. Coverage scenarios — when someone covers for a colleague, when a new team member onboards, when an account transitions — are usually disasters because context evaporates. Covering for a colleague on PTO. Day before PTO starts, the colleague generates Template C briefings for each meeting their cover will attend. Briefings get shared with the cover (Slack DM, email, shared doc). Cover scans each briefing 5 minutes before its meeting; walks in informed; counterparty barely notices the handoff. The investment from the colleague going on PTO: maybe 15 minutes generating briefings. The payoff for customer experience: substantial. Onboarding a new team member into ongoing situations. Every new team member inherits a portfolio of ongoing relationships. Historically the onboarding is a series of “let me bring you up to speed” conversations. With this workflow, briefings get generated for each ongoing relationship; the new team member reads them in their first few days; they walk into their first meetings already informed. This is one of the highest-leverage uses of the workflow — new hires who would historically be useful at month four become useful at week three. Account transitions. When an account moves from one CSM/AE to another, the briefing is the handoff. The outgoing rep generates Template A; the incoming rep reads it; the relationship continues with the customer feeling continuity. Add personal context the model can’t extract — “Lisa is hard to read but always engaged when we talk about data; Marcus is the real decision-maker even though Lisa is the contact”. Manager transitions. When a report’s manager changes — reorg, departure, promotion — the new manager inherits the relationship cold. The new manager reading the 1:1 briefings can pick up real threads on the first 1:1 — “I know you’ve been raising the integration timeline issue; how is that going?” The transition feels continuous rather than reset. Returning from your own leave. Apply the workflow to yourself when returning from extended PTO: what’s happened in the meeting series while I was out, what threads should I pick back up, what did the cover commit to that I’m now inheriting. A 30-minute “catch up on my own life” briefing session at the end of a vacation prevents the “I’m back but I have no idea what’s going on” first week.What this workflow doesn’t do (and how to work around it)
The honest summary: this workflow is built on the cross-meeting Q&A pattern, which is the most-workarounded capability in the entire workflow series. What works without workaround:- Single-call briefings (prep needs only the last meeting)
- Asking a focused question of any one past meeting via the Composer
- Finding prior meetings by keyword via Cmd+K full-text search
- Multi-call briefings across a customer’s history
- 1:1 briefings drawing on the report’s last six meetings
- Project briefings synthesizing across many recent sessions
- Coverage briefings spanning the original owner’s full history with the counterparty
Common pitfalls
- Skipping the briefing on busy days. The exact days when briefings are most valuable are the days when you’re rushed enough to skip them. The 60-second cost is worth paying.
- Trying to read briefings in full. They’re scan documents. Headlines, bullets, verbatim quotes; close it; walk in.
- Treating the briefing as a script. The briefing primes you; it doesn’t script the meeting.
- Generating briefings too early. A briefing generated two days before the meeting may be slightly stale. Generate close to the meeting.
- Pasting raw briefing content into the meeting context. Briefings often contain candid notes — “watch for: customer was frustrated about pricing.” Don’t paste these as-is into the meeting room or share with the counterparty.
- Assuming the briefing is complete. The briefing reflects what was captured. If important context lived in Slack threads or emails Earmark didn’t see, the briefing won’t include it.
- Generating briefings for every meeting. Some meetings don’t benefit. Standups, all-hands, and first-time calls don’t need them.
- Inventing context. The model can fabricate plausible-sounding prior context that didn’t actually happen. The verbatim-quote check is your defense — if the briefing references a specific quote, that’s source-grounded; if it asserts a pattern without specifics, scrutinize.
- Not using briefings during handoffs and coverage. The single largest missed opportunity. Coverage briefings should be standard practice.
- Letting briefings replace relationship-building. The briefing primes you; it doesn’t substitute for being attentive in the meeting itself.
- Reading the briefing during the meeting. Visible reading reads as inattention. Read before; reference its content naturally.
Where to go next
- Workflows — the general shape this is an instance of
- Ad-hoc Q&A — the underlying capability this workflow systematizes; covers the cross-meeting workaround in detail
- Command menu — for finding the prior meetings to assemble into briefing context
- Local transcripts — for very large corpora where external synthesis is the alternative
- People and team meetings workflow — for the 1:1 capture artifacts that feed Template B briefings
- Sales calls workflow — for the deal context that feeds Template A briefings on customer accounts
- Customer onboarding and training workflow — for implementation contexts where briefings draw on session histories
- Custom templates — visibility, sharing, and edit permissions
- Composer — the surface where briefing generation actually runs
- Before a meeting — the per-meeting workflow this prep workflow precedes