How to prepare for a meeting in two minutes

Most mornings there are about two minutes between sitting down and your first meeting. That is enough time to remember who you are about to talk to, as long as what you know about them is in one place.

Groupthink is a memory for the people in your life and work. Today is the page it opens on, and it is built for those two minutes. If you signed up last week, connected a calendar and haven’t been back since, this is the page to come back to. Here is what is on it and what to do with it.

In short: to prepare for a meeting in two minutes, open Today, click the card for your first meeting, read when you last met and the line under Open threads, and add a note if you remember something the card doesn’t show.

How to open the Today page

Go to app.groupthink.com/today, or click Today at the top of the sidebar. The page greets you, with the date underneath.

The first load of the morning can be slow, because Groupthink puts the page together when you ask for it. While it works you’ll see a panel titled Gathering today’s brief. Give it a moment.

Read the prep card for your first meeting

The first section is Prep for today. It has one card for each meeting on today’s calendar. A card shows the meeting’s title and start time, with the people in it on the right. Find your first meeting and click the card to open it.

Say you are Maya Okonjo, a consultant, and your first meeting is a 9:30 with Theo Marchetti, a client you see most weeks. Opened, the card lists Theo by name. If Groupthink has a record of your last conversation, the card says when, as in “Last met 5 days ago.” Under Open threads it lists what is still unsettled between the two of you. Maya’s card has one: she told Theo she would send a revised timeline.

That line is the one to read. An open thread is usually the first thing to bring up, or the thing to finish before the call starts.

If you want more than the card shows, click Theo’s name or Review intel to open his page.

What a prep card shows in your first week

Expect short cards at first. Your calendar tells Groupthink who you met and when. It doesn’t say what was said. So on a new account, a card is usually the meeting and the people in it, with nothing under them yet. A person is shown by name only when the calendar invite carried their name. If it didn’t, find them in Relationships, where they are listed by email address, and save a name on their page.

Cards fill in as you record meetings or log conversations yourself. After one captured conversation with Theo, there is something on his card the next time he is on your calendar.

If someone in the meeting isn’t one of your contacts yet, they appear on the card with a Save as contact button. One click adds them.

Add a note before the meeting

Each card has a row of buttons under the title. The one worth using in the morning is Add note. It opens a short form on the card. If you remember something about the person that the card doesn’t show, type it there: “Theo’s budget review is at the end of the month. He was worried about the warehouse costs.” Click Save. Groupthink reads the note and updates Theo’s page, so it is there the next time you look him up.

This is the fastest way to make a short card longer. One or two sentences before each meeting adds up over a few weeks.

When you have read a card, you can click Mark prepped. The title gets a line through it and a Prepped tag, which helps on a day with six meetings. It is optional.

Check open threads and relationship check-ins

Below the prep cards is a list of what is pending across everyone you keep up with. Most parts appear only when they have something in them. Two are worth knowing about from the start:

• Open threads lists things you owe people. This one covers everyone, including people who aren’t on today’s calendar.
• Relationship check-ins lists people you are overdue to talk to. It works from how often you said you want to be in touch with each person, so until you set that for someone it has no names in it, only a Set your first cadence button.

On a new account the whole list can be empty. Then none of its parts appear, not even that button, and the page says Nothing pending right now. If you have meetings tomorrow, the list has Prep for tomorrow in it instead. Either one is what a new record looks like. Nothing is broken.

If the page isn’t what you expected

No meetings today. means the calendar you connected has nothing on it today. If you know you have meetings, they are probably on a calendar you haven’t connected. In the sidebar, under Today, open Calendar & booking and connect it there.

If you see one large card titled Your first brief builds itself as meetings and notes arrive, Groupthink has nothing to work from yet. Click Add your first contact and add one person you’ll see this week.

To look at another day, use the arrows at the top of the page. Day, Week and Month switch the view, and the Today button brings you back.

Tomorrow morning

Open Today before your first meeting and read one card. If it is short, add a note with what you remember about the person. That is how the page gets more useful: a little at a time, from what you already know.

The full reference for the page is in the help center under Today.