AI Meeting Notes Made My Meetings Worse (Until I Fixed How I Used Them)
The transcripts piled up, nobody read them, and attention dropped. The fix was not a better tool, it was a dumber habit.
The AI meeting notes were flawless and my meetings got worse anyway. Six months in, I had perfect transcripts of everything and a worse memory of any of it, and the people around me had stopped listening too, because the bot was 'taking notes' for all of us.
The first failure was attention laundering. With capture guaranteed, everyone's incentive to engage in real time dropped. The transcript became a shared excuse: why push for clarity now when the summary will exist? The summaries existed. The clarity did not. A decision that is recorded but vague is a dispute scheduled for next month.
The second failure was the unread archive. Transcripts piled up at a rate no human reads, and the reading debt created its own anxiety. Worse, skimming AI summaries replaced the act of thinking during the meeting, and I noticed my questions getting worse in the meetings that were 'safely' recorded.
The fix was embarrassingly low-tech: the transcript is for the people who were not there, and the summary is written before the meeting ends, by whoever called it, in three sentences maximum. If the caller cannot write the three sentences, the meeting had no point, and that rule has killed more bad meetings than any calendar tool.
AI notes are genuinely useful as a safety net and a record for absentees. As an attention substitute they are poison, because attention was the entire product of the meeting. The tools fixed note-taking and quietly broke listening, and getting the first back cost me the second for six months before I noticed the trade.