Your first ten minutes in Groupthink

Most tools for keeping track of people open on an empty list and a button that says “Add contact.” Then you spend an evening typing in people you already know, and you stop around the fifteenth name.

Groupthink starts from the meetings you already had. It’s a memory for the people in your life and work, and the fastest way to fill it is a calendar you’ve been keeping for years. Follow along with Maya Okonjo, a consultant who signed up on a Monday morning between calls.

Minute one: sign in and say who you are

Maya went to app.groupthink.com and picked Continue with Google. You can also use Microsoft, Apple or an email link. There’s no password to make up.

The first screen asks for your name, job title, company and location. Only your name is required, and you can skip the rest. Maya filled in her name and title and clicked Continue.

Minute two: connect your calendar

The next screen offers two ways in. The card marked Recommended is Connect your calendar. The other is for pasting or forwarding notes from a notetaker you already use.

If you signed in with Google or Microsoft, the calendar card may already say Connected, because that sign-in asks for calendar access up front. Maya’s did. If yours doesn’t, click it and approve the request from Google or Microsoft. Outlook calendars work too.

Minutes three to five: watch your past meetings come in

The next screen is titled Here’s what Groupthink already knows. While the import runs you’ll see a line like “Importing your calendar history: 412 events so far” with a progress bar. Under it, a list of people starts to fill in. These are the people you met with: the required guests on your meetings. Anyone who was only an optional guest is left off and shows up later as a suggestion you can add.

Most of them showed as email addresses, because a calendar invite often carries an address and no name. Maya still recognized the first few from their addresses. Theo Marchetti, her client at a logistics company, who she sees every Thursday. Ines Vargas, a former colleague she has lunch with every couple of months. Nora Sandoval, who referred her last two projects.

A few things to know about the import:

• You don’t have to wait. Continue works the whole time, and the import keeps going in the background.
• Meeting rooms, automated no-reply addresses and big events like all-hands and webinars are left out, so the list is people, not conference room B.
• How far back the import goes depends on your plan. The Getting Started guide has the details.

The next screen asks how you want to handle recording the meetings you’d otherwise miss. You can change that later in Calendar & booking, under Today in the sidebar. Maya picked one, clicked through the last screen, and landed on Today. An earlier post covers what to read on the Today page.

Then: three things to do next

Open one person you see every week

Click Relationships in the sidebar. Everyone from your calendar is in the table, with your last and next meetings on the calendar.

Maya opened Theo, who was listed by his email address, and saved his name on his page. For someone who has only been on your calendar so far, the header shows your last meeting on the calendar, like On your calendar Oct 8. That’s a fact about your calendar, so it changes once you record a meeting with Theo or log one. Opening a few people you know well is the quickest way to check the import picked up the right ones.

Read your first Daily Brief

At 5pm on weekdays Groupthink sends one email to get you ready for tomorrow. It goes out when tomorrow has a meeting with other people on it, or when you captured a meeting today. The email lists tomorrow’s meetings and the people in them, and includes short recaps of meetings you captured that day. How much prep it includes for each person depends on your plan.

Maya’s first brief arrived that evening with Tuesday’s meetings on it. She read it on the train.

Capture one meeting

Your calendar knows who you were scheduled to meet and when. It doesn’t know what you talked about. That part comes from capturing a meeting.

The simplest way is to add the Groupthink notetaker to one call on Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams. The notetaker isn’t on every plan, so check pricing first. If you already use another notetaker, you can forward its recap or paste your notes instead.

After Maya’s Thursday call with Theo, his page picked up the things he’d mentioned: a new warehouse opening in the spring, and a budget review at the end of the month. Each one names the meeting it came from and starts out marked Suggested, so she can check it and confirm it with one click.

That’s ten minutes

Maya didn’t type in a single contact. She connected a calendar she’d been keeping for years, and the people in it were there when she looked. Most of them only needed a name.

If you want to keep up with the people you meet without writing everything down, start at app.groupthink.com. The Getting Started guide covers setup in more detail.