Marko runs a nine-person marketing agency in Belgrade, the kind that pitches three new clients a week and half-forgets what any of them asked for by Friday. I met him at a coworking space in Belgrade last spring, both of us waiting on the same broken coffee machine to fix itself. He told me he spent every Sunday night rebuilding his notes from four client calls that week, because during the actual calls he was too busy nodding and talking to write anything useful. Half the time he'd open his notebook Monday morning and not even recognize his own handwriting. Two weeks after we talked and he told me his new way of handling things. He had full transcripts, summaries, and action items from every call that week, sitting in his inbox before he'd even said goodbye to the last client. His weekends are his again.

A recent Atlassian survey found that 54% of employees leave meetings without a clear idea of what happens next and if you're the one taking notes by hand while also running the call, that number won't surprise you. My honest opinion: manual meeting notes are the dumbest tax a small business pays, because you're doing two demanding jobs at once — listening and writing — and you end up doing both badly. You nod, you scribble fragments, then you rebuild the “real” notes from memory an hour later, and your best guess quietly replaces the client's actual words. Multiply that by every call you take in a week, and you're spending hours reconstructing conversations you already sat through once, on top of the time you spent actually sitting through them. This isn't really a note-taking problem. It's an attention problem wearing a note-taking costume, and it's fixable today without hiring anyone or buying anything. It's not just your time either: a client who gets a vague, late follow-up quietly starts wondering whether you were actually listening. If this sounds familiar, keep reading.

Step 1. Go to fathom.video and sign up for Fathom (a free AI notetaker that joins your video calls and writes up the notes for you), no credit card needed. Connect it to your Google or Outlook calendar — it only needs read access to see when your meetings start — so it automatically knows about your upcoming calls and shows up on its own without you touching anything. This is the only setup step, and it takes about three minutes.

Step 2. Before your next client call, mention you're trying out a note-taking assistant — something as simple as “I'm using an AI tool to take notes so I can focus on the conversation” works fine. It appears as a visible participant named “Fathom Notetaker,” so there's nothing to hide anyway, and most clients relax once you explain it means they'll get a proper follow-up instead of a vague one. This small heads-up also keeps you on the right side of recording-consent rules in most countries.

Step 3. Talk normally. Don't write a single word. Fathom records, transcribes, and turns the call into a clean summary with clear action items the moment it ends, which means you walk out of the call with your hands free and your attention on the actual conversation instead of your notebook.

Step 4. Copy that summary straight into your follow-up email instead of writing one from scratch — try opening with “Here's what we covered and what happens next” instead of a blank page — and send it the same day while the details are still fresh for the client too. The free plan gives you five AI summaries a month at no cost — after that, you still get the full transcript, just without the automatic summary layered on top, which is still faster than typing from memory. Either way, the annoying part is already done for you.

If you don't want another app joining your calls — say it's an in-person meeting, or a client who'd rather you didn't record — this works too. Paste your transcript, or even messy handwritten notes, into Claude or ChatGPT with this:

Drop your notes in where the brackets are, and it turns a messy page of scribbles into something you can copy straight into an email in under a minute. Swap “decisions” and “action items” for whatever categories actually matter in your meetings — the structure is a starting point, not a rule.

Of course, I am using it as well now as my old note-taking system was three words per meeting and a lot of misplaced confidence.

Marko hasn't spent a Sunday night rebuilding notes since the week he tried this. What's the one task eating your week that has nothing to do with the work you're actually good at? Subscribe to get next week's answer.