The Recap Workflow.

The most universally useful AI workflow for senior professionals is also the most boring one. It is the recap.

Take scattered notes from a call, a meeting, or a long-running matter. Produce a clean, client-ready memo. Twelve to fifteen minutes, including the edit.

The structure of a useful recap

Every good recap has the same four parts, in this order:

• What we covered. Two to four sentences. Neutral tone. No editorialising.
• What was decided. A short list. Each decision, one line.
• What is next. A short list. Each action, with an owner and a date.
• Open questions. A short list. Anything not resolved.

That is the whole shape. You can deliver it as an email or a one-page memo. The structure does not change.

The prompt

Below are my raw notes from [type of meeting] with [Client A / Partner B / Counterparty C]. Produce a recap memo with these four sections, in this exact order:
1. What we covered (2–4 sentences, neutral)
2. What was decided (bullet list)
3. What is next (bullet list with owner + date)
4. Open questions (bullet list)
Tone: calm, senior, professional. Length: about 250 words. Use placeholders where I have used them. Do not invent details.

Notes:
[paste]

Sanitisation, first

You sanitise the notes before you paste them. Client name becomes [Client A]. Real dollar figures become bands: [mid-seven-figure]. Counterparty names become [Counterparty C]. The model produces the memo with the placeholders intact. You substitute the real names back in during your edit, in your own document, locally.

This is the same discipline as the Never Upload List. Same reason.

The edit, not the draft

The output you get back will be 70–85 percent of the memo you would have written yourself. Your job is the remaining 15–30 percent:

• The two sentences about tone, posture, or politics that the model could not have known
• The one decision that is more important than the others, which the model treated as one bullet among many
• The open question that you know from context is actually the central question
• The name corrections, the date corrections, the figure corrections

If your edit is bigger than that, the input notes were not detailed enough. The fix is on the input side.

What this buys you

About thirty minutes back, per recap. Probably four or five recaps a week, for a senior professional with a normal book. That is two hours. Compounded over a year, that is a working month.

The clients also notice. Recaps that arrive same-day, in clean shape, with clear next steps, change the way the client experiences the relationship. The system is small. The compounding is not.

Filed under Workflow · The Leverage Years · Vol. I, Issue 13.