Welcome to Prompt, Tinker, Innovate—my AI playground. Each edition gives you a hands-on experiment that shows how AI can sharpen your thinking, streamline your process, and power up your creative work.
This week's playground: Let AI build your pre-meeting brief so you walk in ready
You have the meeting on your calendar. You know the topic. You probably even know what you want to accomplish. What you don't have is the 20 minutes it takes to pull together everything you need to show up sharp—who's in the room, what was decided last time, what's still unresolved, and what you actually want to walk out with.
That's the brief no one writes. This week's experiment writes it for you.
What's actually happening
This prompt turns your meeting context into a structured pre-brief. Connect your AI tool to your email, calendar, and any other tools where your work lives—Notion, a CRM, Google Drive, etc.—and it handles the gathering for you. The output includes a context summary, the most important things to know going in, your objective stated clearly, questions you should be ready to answer, and any risks or sensitivities worth flagging. Think of it as the prep work your calendar app should have been doing all along.
Your AI experiment: Try this prompt
👉 Time to tinker: Open your favorite AI tool (connected to your productivity tools), fill in your meeting name, and send it. The more your tools are connected, the less you have to fill in manually.
📝 Prompt:
Build me a pre-meeting brief for my [MEETING NAME] today. Using my connected tools, pull the calendar invite, any agenda details, recent emails, meeting notes, and documents related to this topic, prior meeting decisions, and attendee context. Produce: 1. A one-paragraph context summary—what this meeting is about and where things stand 2. The three most important things to know walking in 3. My top objective for the meeting, stated clearly 4. Two or three questions I should be ready to answer 5. Any risks, open questions, or sensitivities worth flagging
💡 Pro tips: Set this up once and it gets faster every time
- Name your projects consistently across every tool where work lives. Email, calendar, Notion, your CRM, meeting notes—if everything related to Project X includes "Project X" in the subject, title, or tag, AI can find it all in seconds. No hunting, no reconstructing context from memory.
- Don't just run this the night before—schedule it. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini all support scheduled prompts. Set one up once and forget it: "Every day at 6pm, check my calendar for tomorrow's meetings. For each one, pull any related emails, notes, and documents, then generate a pre-meeting brief that includes context, attendee stakes, open questions, my goal for the meeting, and anything I should be prepared to address." Prep stops being a task and becomes something that just happens.
- Turn the brief into a follow-up. After the meeting, ask AI to review your meeting notes and turn them into a follow-up email—decisions made, next steps, and owners. "Review the notes from [MEETING NAME] today and draft a follow-up email that captures what was decided, who owns what, and any open items." One prompt closes the loop on everything the brief opened.
What did you discover?
Try it before your next meeting—even a routine one. Drop a comment and tell me whether it surfaced something you hadn't thought about, or whether the attendee snapshots actually captured the room.
Until next time—keep tinkering, keep prompting, keep innovating.
📩 Not subscribed yet? Hit the button at the top. You won't want to miss what's next.
