The Meeting Prep

Meetings produce two artifacts and an argument. The artifacts: a decision somebody half-remembers, and action items nobody wrote down. The argument: three weeks later, about what was decided. Entire software categories exist to fix this, and yet the fix has been sitting in your kitchen since First Kitchen: messy text in, structured text out — the one dish your agent cooks perfectly every single time.

The trick, as with the sous-chef in Lesson 3, is the raw material. Not a transcript (your workplace may not allow recording, and honestly the transcript is 90% noise) — your own live scratch notes, typed the way you already type them: fragments, half-sentences, "john says budget??". Ugly is fine. Ugly is the format.

What you'll plate today

A meeting station: scratch notes go in, a recap with owned action items comes out thirty seconds later — plus the prep sheet trick that shortens the next meeting before it starts.

Ingredients

• Your prep-station kitchen and journal habit from Lesson 3
• Scratch notes from one real meeting — today's if you have one, last week's from memory if not, into meetings/2026-07-07-budget-sync.txt
• About 25 minutes

Cook

1. Cook the recap

Read meetings/[your file]. These are my live scratch notes — expect
fragments and typos. Cook a recap into the same folder as
[date]-recap.md:

1. DECIDED — things that were actually decided, one line each.
   Distinguish decided from discussed: if my notes don't show a
   decision landing, it goes under OPEN, not DECIDED.
2. ACTIONS — who owes what by when. Mark anything without a clear
   owner as ⚠ UNOWNED — don't assign owners I didn't write.
3. OPEN — the questions still hanging.
4. If a note fragment is genuinely undecipherable, quote it under
   "couldn't parse" instead of guessing.

Read the recap. The DECIDED-versus-discussed line is the whole value — that distinction is exactly what human memory blurs and what the three-weeks-later argument is made of. And the ⚠ UNOWNED markers? Those are the action items that were always going to fall through the cracks. Now they have a warning label while the meeting is still warm enough to fix it.

2. Close the loop while it's warm

Two orders, right after each meeting:

Log the DECIDED lines to my journal. And draft me a two-line
follow-up message for the ⚠ UNOWNED items — asking who's taking
them, addressed to the room, in my plain register.

Feel the compound interest: the recap feeds the journal, the journal feeds Friday's report (Lesson 3), and the unowned-items message makes you the person in the room who notices. Total cost: one paste. (Send button: still yours. Always yours.)

3. The prep sheet — the half nobody automates

Recaps look backward. The bigger win looks forward:

Tomorrow I have [meeting] with [roles]. Cook a prep sheet from my
kitchen's memory: search journal.md and meetings/ for everything
touching this topic or these people — last decisions, open items,
things I owed them, things they owed me. One page, newest first.

Walk into the meeting with that page and watch what changes: you're the one who remembers what was decided last time, who owed what, which open question never got answered. That reputation — "she never loses a thread" — is what this course quietly builds. It was never about the files.

4. Make it a station

Create a skill "meeting": given a scratch-notes file, cook the
recap (decided/actions/open, unowned flagged), log decisions to
the journal, and draft the unowned-items follow-up. And a skill
"prep": given a topic and people, cook the prep sheet from my
kitchen's memory. Save point "the meeting station", CHORES.md done.

When it burns

• Your scratch notes are too thin to recap — the fix is at the source and it's tiny: during meetings, type D: before decisions and A: before actions as they happen. Two characters of structure while listening; the agent does the rest forever.
• It promoted a discussion to DECIDED — push back hard, this one matters: "Where in my notes did that land as a decision? Move it to OPEN and be stricter — DECIDED needs decision language." Strictness here is the product.
• The prep sheet came back nearly empty — your kitchen's memory is only three lessons old; it compounds weekly. This is the strongest argument for the ten-second journal habit — every log line is a future prep sheet.
• "Can it join the call and transcribe?" — tools exist, and this is a Lesson 9 question wearing a Lesson 5 costume: recording colleagues has consent and policy written all over it. Scratch notes are yours alone — that's why this design.
• Someone asks for your recap — send it (after a read — your name, your taste). Recaps that arrive while the meeting is warm are rare enough to be a reputation. Watch what it does to yours.

Order up

□ One real meeting: scratch in, recap out — decided vs discussed kept honest
□ ⚠ UNOWNED items caught, follow-up drafted, journal fed
□ One prep sheet cooked from your kitchen's memory
□ Skills "meeting" and "prep" standing by; CHORES.md fourth DONE

Next up — Lesson 06: The Daily Specials Board. Everything you've built — butler, journal, digest, meetings — starts reporting to one place: a morning briefing that's waiting before you sit down.

Stuck on a step? Question box below.