Turning Messy Meeting Notes Into a Project Brief (Notion AI)
A kickoff meeting produced 2,000 words of notes and no direction. This Notion AI sequence turned them into a one-page brief the whole team actually used.
The kickoff was great, the notes were chaos: 2,000 words of mixed decisions, worries, tangents, and three different names for the same feature. A brief needs to exist before momentum dies, and this three-prompt sequence in Notion AI produced mine in about ten minutes.
Prompt one is the extraction pass: 'From these notes, list every decision made, every open question, and every action item with the person it was assigned to, quoting the note for each.' Quote-forcing matters. Without it, Notion AI invents tidy versions of things people almost said, and those tidied ghosts cause arguments in week three.
Prompt two is the synthesis pass: 'Write a project brief with goal, scope, non-goals, timeline, and risks. Only use information from the extraction above; mark anything missing as UNKNOWN.' The UNKNOWN convention is the trick. A brief that admits gaps gets filled in by the team; a brief that papers over gaps gets discovered wrong in week three.
Prompt three is the skepticism pass, which is the one everyone skips: 'What contradictions exist between the notes? Where did people disagree and was it resolved?' Kickoff meetings are full of polite unresolved disagreement, and this prompt is how I found out that two people had walked out with opposite ideas of who owns the timeline.
The brief went into the project page, the extraction stayed underneath as an appendix, and the UNKNOWN list became the agenda for the follow-up. Total cost: ten minutes and three prompts, versus the usual approach of the brief never getting written at all.