Think about the last site meeting, client call or supplier conversation you had.
Somebody agreed to do something. Possibly three somebodies agreed to three things. You wrote some of it in a notebook, or you did not, and you carried the rest around in your head for the afternoon. By Thursday two of those things had happened and one had quietly not, and nobody noticed until the customer asked about it.
Nobody forgot on purpose. Nothing was written down in a form anybody could check.
This is a good place to start if you have never used any of this before. Try it on one short meeting. Treat the timings in this guide as rough.
What you are actually doing
You are turning talking into a short written record with names and dates attached.
It does not happen at the moment because writing up a meeting properly takes twenty minutes of concentration you have not got when you are already late for the next thing. So it gets a scribble in a notebook, or nothing.
Doing this with AI can cut the twenty minutes to a few, once you have done it a couple of times. At twenty it happens now and then. At a few minutes it is easier to do after every meeting.
Before you start
You need a free Claude account. Claude is the AI assistant made by a company called Anthropic.
- On a laptop, go to claude.ai. On a phone, download the Claude app for iPhone or Android. Sign up with your email address.
- You will see a message box. Type or paste your request into it, then press the send button.
- Claude's reply appears underneath. When it does, that step is done.
Four things worth knowing before you paste anything in:
- Voice notes. To talk instead of type, tap the microphone on your phone's keyboard and speak. Your phone turns what you say into text in the message box.
- Leave out what you do not need. Skip bank details, and anything personal about a customer that the job does not need. If you would rather your chats were not used to train Anthropic's models, check the privacy settings in Claude.
- You check everything. What comes back is a draft. Read it against your own notes before it goes to anyone, and correct names, dates and prices. It does get things wrong.
- Limits. The free plan has usage limits. If you hit one, wait, or finish that one by hand.
The simplest version: talk into your phone
You do not need a meeting transcription service to start. You need your phone and the Claude app.
Walk out of the meeting, sit in the van or in the car park, open the Claude app and tap the message box. Tap the microphone on your keyboard and talk for ninety seconds. It does not need to be neat. Start with the basics: today's date, your name, who was there, which job it was and why you were there. Then say what happened:
"Right, it's Thursday the fifteenth of October, I'm Sam, met Dave at the Wokingham site, second fix. He wants the second fix brought forward to the week starting Monday the ninth of November because his tenant is moving in early. Said I would confirm by Friday the sixteenth of October whether that is doable. He is chasing his electrician about the consumer unit, that is on him not me. Oh and he asked about the extra socket in the utility, I said I would price it separately. Parking is going to be a problem from Monday the nineteenth of October because they are resurfacing."
Say the month with any date, and say which day you mean by "Friday" or "Monday". Claude only has what you tell it, and a date left vague is a date it may guess. Read the text on the screen and fix any names your phone got wrong. You are done with this part when the message box holds your notes as text.
Then type this above your notes, and send:
Here are my notes from a site meeting, dictated straight afterwards so they are a bit rambling.
Turn it into a short record with:
- What was agreed
- What I have to do, with dates
- What the other party has to do, with dates
- Anything left open that needs a decision
Only use dates that were actually agreed. If none was, write "date not agreed". Keep what the other person asked for separate from what I agreed to.
Then draft a short email I can send [customer's name] confirming it. Friendly, but clear about who is doing what. Keep any private observations of mine out of the email.
Swap [customer's name] for the real name before you send the prompt. You get a clean record and a draft confirmation email in a few minutes. Now check them. Read both against what you said. Correct names and dates, and delete anything presented as agreed that you did not actually agree to. Keep requests and open questions under their own headings. The job is done when the record says what happened, not just when it reads well.
Then send the email. Copy only the email text into your email app, check the recipient, add a subject line and send it. Ask Dave to tell you if anything is wrong. Save the record somewhere you will find it again: one folder, or one notes document, with the date and the job in the name, such as "2026-10-15 Wokingham second fix". If Dave replies with a correction, update the saved record.
That confirmation email is the valuable half. It gives you both a chance to spot a misunderstanding about the new date while it is still easy to fix, as long as it actually gets checked and sent.
A note on recording other people
If you record a call rather than talking to yourself afterwards, tell people first and say why. If anyone objects, take notes instead.
Talking into your own phone afterwards records only you. Notes about a customer are still that customer's personal information, so keep them to what the job needs and delete recordings you no longer need.
The better version: let it listen
If you do a lot of calls, particularly on Teams or Zoom, the next step up is a transcription tool that sits in the meeting and produces the transcript for you. Plenty exist, and some are built into what you already pay for. Microsoft Teams can do it if transcription is switched on for your organisation and you have permission in that meeting. Use your meeting software's own transcript or recap option to download the text.
The workflow is the same, just with less talking to yourself in a car park. Take the transcript and ask for the same output.
Most people do not read transcripts end to end, as they are long. What you use day to day is the short action list. Keep the transcript to check against. You still need to pull out the actions and follow them up.
Here is the transcript of a client call. My name is [your name]. The other people on the call are [names]. Ignore the chat, the pleasantries and anything about scheduling the call itself.
Give me: decisions made, my actions with dates, their actions with dates, anything that was raised and not resolved. If you cannot tell who said something, mark it "check who".
Only use dates that were actually agreed. If none was, write "date not agreed".
List anything that was said tentatively, or where two people seemed to mean different things. Quote the wording and give me a question to ask to settle it. Those are the ones that cause trouble later.
Then draft a short email confirming the actions. Keep any private observations of mine out of it.
That tentative-wording instruction is the one worth keeping. Trouble after a meeting often comes from the things everybody thought were agreed, each in their own way. Check the answers and send the email as above.
Making it stick across the week
One meeting written up is useful. Doing it every time, and looking at the result every day, is what gives you the benefit.
Keep one running action list in the same notes document or folder. For each action write what it is, who owns it, the due date and its status. Add to it after each meeting. Look at it each morning, and put anything due that week into the calendar on your phone as a reminder, so it is not waiting for Friday.
At the end of the week, put all of it together:
Today is [date]. Here is my action list from last week, then this week's meeting records, and the things I have finished. Give me one list of everything that is not yet done, in date order, with the most overdue at the top. Keep actions with no date in a separate list at the bottom. Keep it short enough to read on a phone.
Update your saved list with the result, check it against what you remember, and set a reminder for anything that needs chasing. Many people find a couple of things on the list they had lost sight of.
A worked example: from survey notes to a follow-up email
An invented example. Hughes Electrical and everyone named here are made up.
Before. Gareth runs a two-person electrical firm in Bracknell. After a rewire survey on Thursday 15 October 2026 he dictates this in the van:
"I'm Gareth, Hughes Electrical. Survey with Mrs Okafor at her house, 9 Larch Close, Thursday the fifteenth of October. Full rewire, three bed semi. She wants it done before her daughter moves back on the twentieth of next month. Board's in the garage. She's asked about outside sockets, two of them, I said I'd price those separately. Floors are going down after us so we need to be finished first, she's checking dates with her flooring man. I told her I would send the quote by Wednesday the twenty-first of October."
After. He asks for the record and an email, using the prompt above with Mrs Okafor's name in place of the placeholder. Here is the record, after he has read it against his notes:
- Requested by Mrs Okafor: full rewire at 9 Larch Close, finished before 20 November 2026. Not yet agreed. Price, acceptance and our availability are all unresolved.
- Gareth to do: send the rewire quote by Wednesday 21 October, with the two outside sockets priced separately.
- Mrs Okafor to do: check her flooring dates with her fitter. Date not agreed.
- Still open: whether the outside sockets go ahead, and whether the flooring dates fit with a finish before 20 November.
And this is the draft email, which he corrects before it goes:
Hi Mrs Okafor, thanks for showing me round today. To confirm: I'll send the rewire quote by Wednesday 21 October, with the two outside sockets priced separately so you can decide on those. I've noted that you would like the work finished before 20 November, which is not agreed yet. Could you let me know your flooring dates once you have them, so we can see how they fit? Thanks, Gareth
The first draft said "we'll aim to be finished before the 20th". Gareth had not agreed that, so he took it out. That is what the checking step is for.
Then. He copies only the email into his email app, checks the address, adds the subject "9 Larch Close: rewire quote" and sends it. He saves the record in his folder as "2026-10-15 Larch Close". When Mrs Okafor replies with the flooring dates, he adds them to the record and to his action list, and he adds "send Larch Close quote, Wednesday 21 October" to his action list.
Three small things that make it much better
Say who was there and what it was about. Thirty seconds of context at the start of your recording gives you a record that makes sense in six months. Site, customer, date, your name, why you were there.
Say the things you did not say out loud. Your own record is for you. If you walked out thinking the customer is going to be difficult about the extras, say so, and stick to what you saw, such as "she questioned the price of the extras twice". Tell Claude to keep these out of the email, and check the email does. They stay in your record, so in four months you will have them.
Split the record from the email. Ask for both, every time. The record is for you, and you check that it reflects your notes accurately. The email is what you are comfortable sending. They should not be the same document, and treating them as the same document is what makes people write bland notes that record nothing useful.
Where this gets you, and where it does not
You can see what you promised to do, and there is a written email to point to when memory differs. It costs you a few minutes per meeting and a free Claude account, and you can start today.
Where it stops:
The first place is when the actions need to go somewhere other than a list. Onto a job sheet, into a project plan, onto somebody else's task list. Reading your actions off a document is fine when it is just you. It gets harder when several people need the same list and copies start to drift, or nobody is sure who owns what.
The second is when you want to look across meetings rather than at one. Every question this customer has asked about extras. Everywhere a particular supplier has been mentioned. That needs the notes stored somewhere searchable rather than scattered through separate conversations, which is a small amount of setup rather than a habit.
The third is when someone else runs the meetings. Consistency becomes the issue rather than speed, in the same way it does with quoting, and it needs an agreed format rather than everybody doing their own version.
You can leave those until the two minute habit is working. A shared folder or document is worth having from the start if there are two of you.
Written by SmartGenie in Reading, Berkshire. If you would rather have this set up and working on your own systems, that is what the SmartStart Pack does.
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