AI Guides › Claude Mastery
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
The usual pattern is to bring Claude in at exactly one point — almost always after, to turn a transcript into notes — and to think of that as "using Claude for meetings." That's a real use, but it's one job out of three genuinely different ones, done at three different times, and treating them as interchangeable is why the other two get skipped entirely.
The rule: a meeting has three separate jobs attached to it — preparing, capturing, and following up — and each needs a different kind of prompt, not one generic "help with my meeting" request.
Ask for a briefing, not a summary of the invite. Useful inputs: who's attending and what you know about their position, what decision or outcome this meeting needs to produce, and what background material exists already (uploaded, not described). A good before-prompt asks specifically for the questions you should be ready for, and the position you're weakest on — not just "background on the topic."
This is the narrowest of the three jobs, and the most dependent on your specific setup — whether you're using a connected meeting tool, dictating notes live, or pasting things in during breaks. Whatever the mechanism, the job here is capture, not analysis: get the material down accurately in the moment, and save the interpreting for afterwards, when you're not also trying to participate in the meeting itself.
This is where most people already work, and it's worth doing properly rather than settling for a generic recap. Ask for three separate things, not one blended one: a factual record of what was decided, a list of action items with owners (only where the transcript actually names one — don't let it invent an owner to fill a gap), and open questions that weren't resolved. Keeping these three separate is what makes the output usable a week later, rather than a paragraph you have to re-read to extract the one action item you actually needed.
Skip asking for a single "meeting summary" that tries to do all three jobs in one prompt — it produces something generically thorough and specifically useless, missing the sharper prep-questions and the clean decision/action/open split that come from asking for each job on its own terms. Skip treating the after-meeting notes as more authoritative than your own memory of the room — a transcript captures words, not tone, and a decision that sounded tentative in the room can read as settled in the write-up.