From a meeting to a task list, without notes
The job
Turning meetings into work. Commitments made on a call used to survive on whatever I could write down while also holding the conversation. Wispr Flow now runs all day: speech becomes text in any application, and meetings become transcripts. The job is what happens to the transcript in the hour after the call, because a transcript nobody converts is a longer version of the meeting.
The systems involved
Wispr Flow, for dictation and meeting transcription. My project management system, where every client has a board. The assistant reads the transcript and writes draft tasks onto the right board. Drafts only; nothing goes live unread.
How it works
After the call, the transcript goes to the assistant with a fixed instruction set. Inputs: the transcript and the client’s board as it stands. Definitions: a commitment has an owner and a stated deliverable; a decision is something the group settled; the rest is discussion. Rules: extract only what was agreed, carry owners and deadlines only if they were said aloud, and park anything phrased as a possibility as an open question. Output: draft tasks, each quoting the transcript line it came from, with the decisions and open questions listed beneath. Check: the drafts get read against the call before any of them go live.
Recording has to be settled before this runs on a client call: who is told, what they agree to, and where the words are kept. That is a decision about the relationship before it is a tooling choice, and retrofitting it is an apology.
Where this goes wrong
Meeting language is full of futures being tried out. An idea raised and never taken up reads, flat on the page, exactly like a commitment, so an assistant working from a transcript will produce tasks nobody agreed to. Two things contain it. Every task quotes the line it came from, which makes an invented one easy to spot. And the list stays a draft until someone who was in the room has read it. The review is short, and it is the whole safeguard.
When it’s a poor fit
The fit is poor on any call where the other side has not agreed to recording, or where the subject should leave no artefact at all. It is poor in meetings held to build trust, where the conversation is the deliverable and a recorder changes the room. And it is poor wherever the task list would go unreviewed, because then the manufactured commitments ship.
My experience
I have stopped taking notes and do not miss them, and I read every draft task list as the work of someone who believes everything they hear.