You Are Using AI Note Takers Wrong

Most people use AI note-takers to remember what others said. That's the least interesting thing they can do.

I have an AI note taker called Granola running on every call. Dozens of meetings a week. One-on-ones, team syncs, external calls, strategy sessions. It records everything, transcribes it, and generates a summary.

For months, I used it the way everyone does. "What were the action items from that call?" "What did so-and-so say about the timeline?" Glorified minutes.

Then I started asking it different questions.

Ask It About You

A few months ago, I had a call with a performance coach. He works with concert musicians, Wall Street traders, and airline pilots. The kind of guy who's spent decades studying what happens to people under pressure.

Within the first few minutes, before I'd said much of anything useful, he told me things about myself I didn't know. My eyes were scanning. I was bouncing between left brain and right brain at the wrong moments, scrambling words without realizing it. He asked me to deliver the opening line of a presentation. I fumbled through something about zero-knowledge. It was bad. He told me it was horrible, and he was right.

Then he walked me through a centering technique. Close your eyes. Hear the line in your head. Don't speak until it's clear. When it's clear, open your eyes and deliver it slowly.

Night and day. And I could feel the difference.

I went back to the Granola transcript after that call and re-read the whole thing. Not for his advice (I remembered that). For me. For the part where I was rambling before the session started, talking too fast, jumping between topics, not letting him finish sentences. All of which I didn't notice in the moment. The transcript doesn't lie.

I started doing this after every important call. Not "what did they say" but "how did I come across?"

The answers are uncomfortable. My brain is in overdrive, discussing too many topics. I'm already three steps ahead in my own head and want people to catch up. None of this is visible to me in real time. All of it is visible in the transcript.

Ask It About Your Team

I manage a distributed team. People across time zones, different communication styles, different levels of experience presenting to senior stakeholders.

One person on my team had a pattern I couldn't quite name until I started reading transcripts. In meetings with leadership, they'd spend the first twenty minutes trying to justify their team's existence instead of getting to the point. Three or four categories with subcategories, disclaimers like "this isn't important but let me explain anyway," tangents that circled back to the original topic only after everyone had lost the thread. The senior person on the other end would eventually say something polite like "thanks for the update, can we talk about the other thing now?"

I'd noticed this in real time, vaguely. But reading the transcript made the pattern undeniable. It wasn't a one-off. It happened in three consecutive meetings. Same structure, same defensive energy, same result.

That gave me something specific to coach on. Not "your presentations need work" (useless) but "you're spending the first twenty minutes defending your team's existence when nobody is attacking it, and it's burying the actual update." Specific. Actionable. And because I had the transcripts, I could point to exactly where it happened.

The tricky part is that I'd given this feedback before, maybe a dozen times, and it hadn't stuck. But there's a difference between "I feel like you ramble sometimes" and "here, in this meeting, at this point, you said 'this isn't important' and then spoke for four more minutes about it." The transcript makes feedback concrete.

Ask It About Patterns Over Time

Single meetings are snapshots. The archive is the mirror.

I went back through a month of my own transcripts and noticed something I really didn't want to see. In meetings where I'm advocating for something I believe in strongly, I over-explain. I make the case once, then I make it again slightly differently. The first version was usually the best one. The second just diluted it.

I also noticed that in situations where I tried to get ahead of a problem, proactively flagging risks to leadership, reaching out to multiple people to coordinate, I sometimes created more noise than the original problem warranted. In one case, I'd escalated something across several senior people that probably could have been handled with a single conversation. The result was that I caught more heat for the escalation than for the issue itself.

You don't see these patterns in individual meetings. You see them across ten or twenty. And the only way to see them across ten or twenty is to have them all recorded and searchable.

Then Ask It to Judge You

This is the part most people won't do. And it's the most valuable thing I've found.

After about a month of having Granola on every call, I had dozens of transcripts and summaries sitting there. So I asked it a simple question: "Based on my meetings over the past 30 days, how do I come across?"

It gave me the nice version first. Strategic and action-oriented. Pushes for concrete decisions rather than endless debate. Pragmatic problem solver. Direct communicator. The kind of thing you'd put on a LinkedIn recommendation.

Cool. Flattering. Useless.

So I asked: "Now give me the negatives."

That's when it got interesting.

I push people toward decisions when they're still processing, and that what feels like momentum to me can feel like pressure to the person on the other side. Sometimes you're three steps ahead and the other person is still on step one. You know where this is going. They don't yet. And the transcript shows you exactly how that lands.

It had opinions about how I handle influence, how I position ideas, how my proposals tend to land. Six paragraphs of feedback no colleague would ever give me unprompted.

Was all of it fair? Some of it was context-free. But some of it was dead on. And the thing about reading your own transcripts is that you can't unsee it. You said those things. They're right there. The AI just connected the dots you were too close to notice.

I've been in leadership roles for years. I've had 360 reviews, executive coaches, mentors, the works. None of them showed me what a month of my own meeting transcripts showed me in thirty seconds.

The Practice

After every important meeting, I ask three questions:

Give me the highlights.

Where can I improve this conversation?

Did I make my point once and let it land, or did I stack three versions of the same argument?

Would I be happy if someone else read this transcript and judged my communication skills from it?

That last one is the gut check. Because the transcript is exactly what an observer would see. Minus the body language, minus the charm, minus the in-person energy. Just the words. Just the structure. Just the habits.

And then every few weeks, I ask the bigger question. Across everything. How am I showing up? What patterns am I not seeing? Give me the version nobody would say to my face.

But the trick I've found most useful is the simplest one. After the big assessment, I ask it to narrow everything down to one thing. Two max. "Based on all of this, what's the single thing I should focus on improving in the next two weeks?" Not six paragraphs of feedback. Not a personality profile. One thing I can actually hold in my head walking into the next meeting.

That's what makes it stick. A 360 review gives you twenty things to work on. You work on none of them. One clear focus, refreshed every couple of weeks from real data, actually changes behavior.

AI note takers are being marketed as productivity tools. Save time on meeting notes. Never miss an action item. Auto-generate summaries.

Fine.

The real use case is self-awareness. The transcript is a 360 review you can run on yourself after every single meeting. No waiting for annual cycles. No relying on a manager to notice something and find the courage to tell you. No wondering "how did that go?" and filling in the blanks with optimism.

The data is right there. You just have to be willing to ask the uncomfortable question.

Try it after your next meeting. Don't ask what was discussed. Ask how you did. And if you're feeling brave, ask for the negatives.

You probably won't love the answer. That's the point.