Every month, Julie blocked off an entire afternoon just to pull together her client meeting minutes. Four hours gone.
She’s an executive leadership coach. She was trying to save time with AI meeting notes, but it was actually costing her more time.
“I end up with three sets of notes,” she told me. “Zoom catches more next steps. Calendly gives better summaries, but half the details are wrong. My own notes are the only ones I trust. I keep all three because each one catches something different.”
So every month, she’d sit there stitching them together like a patchwork quilt to have something to send to her client.
A 30-minute call stretched into 45 minutes of cleanup. Group calls added another 45 minutes. Some days, she wasted 4 hours on notes.
The Problem
AI meeting tools only know one way to capture notes. But people need different formats:
- Some want clean summaries
- Others want detailed next steps
- Still others need decisions highlighted
When the output doesn’t match what you need, the notes feel useless. So you keep multiple versions, cross-check them, spend extra time rewriting.
Instead of saving time, you double it.
The Solution
Think of AI like a smart intern. If you tell them “go take notes” they’ll give you something. But they don’t know your format or style yet.
It’s the same with AI tools. They give you their default style. But if you take the raw transcript and give AI a clear prompt with your format? You get completely different results.
I created a prompt to create meeting minutes from the raw transcript and showed AI exactly what format she wanted.
Four hours became minutes.
And she said, “Now I actually have room to take on another client!”
Here’s how:
Get the raw transcript from Zoom, Teams, whatever you use. Don’t rely on their highlights.
Pick your format. What saves you time?
- Quick bulleted summary?
- Next steps by person?
- Something formal for the board?
Write a clear prompt. “You are an expert executive coach and note synthesizer. Convert the transcript into polished, professional CLIENT-FACING NOTES. General Rules: [Summarize into three sections: Key Decisions, Next Steps by Person, Open Questions. Use bullet points. Keep it under one page.]”
Replace [ ] with what you want your notes to look like. And for best results upload a sample.
Accept “good enough.” AI won’t be perfect. Neither are team members. Review their work, fix mistakes, move on. If the same errors repeat, tweak your prompt.
The Bigger Picture
Think of AI like a brand new “Awesome Intern.” You have to teach it how to work for you.
Once you do, those hours lost to cleanup will shrink to minutes. Like Julie, you might find space for more clients, bigger projects, or simply ending your day earlier.
Ready to test it? Take your next meeting transcript, decide on the format you want, and have AI restructure it. See what happens when you stop accepting the default and start getting exactly what you need.
If you want help with practical ways to use AI to save you time, reach out and tell me what you’re struggling with.
