Watch the person, not your notes: how to record a meeting with Groupthink

If you take notes during a call, you spend a good part of it looking at your keyboard. You catch the words and miss the pause before someone says the budget is probably fine. You write down the date of the launch and miss that the person across from you looked tired when they said it.

Groupthink is a memory for the people in your life and work. One way it fills in is by recording your calls on Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Then you can watch the person while they talk and read what they said later.

Recording is part of Groupthink Pro. Start free, with 30 days of Pro, no credit card needed. If you don’t upgrade when the trial ends, you move to the Free plan: everything you already recorded stays, but recording new calls needs Pro. The pricing page has the details.

Here is how to set it up, using Ines Vargas as the example. She runs a small design studio, and on Thursday she has a first call with Felix Aurand, who might hire her to redo his company’s website.

Step 1: Decide how Groupthink should show up

Connecting your calendar doesn’t send anything into your meetings. Nothing joins until you choose.

Open Today, then Calendar & booking, and find How should Groupthink attend your meetings? There are three choices:

• Automatically Join All Meetings. The Groupthink notetaker joins your calls as a visible participant.
• Privately Take Notes. The Groupthink desktop app records on your own computer, and nothing joins the call. More on this below.
• Let Me Choose Each Time. Nothing joins on its own. You send the notetaker to a call yourself.

Ines picked Automatically Join All Meetings. From then on the notetaker comes to the video calls on her calendar on its own, as long as someone else is invited. An invite from someone she doesn’t know yet waits until she accepts it.

Step 2: Get the notetaker into the call

With that setting, Ines has nothing to click on Thursday. She sent Felix the invite with a Zoom link, so the notetaker joins when the call starts.

If you’d rather record one call at a time, wait until the call has started, click New at the top of the left sidebar and choose Join by link…. Paste the call’s link and click Start Notetaker. Groupthink opens a page for the meeting and the notetaker asks to join the call. If the link is for an event on your calendar, the page takes that event’s name and its guests.

Two things to know before the call:

• Someone has to let it in. If the call has a waiting room, the notetaker waits there like any guest. If nobody admits it, nothing is recorded. This goes wrong most often on calls someone else hosts: the host doesn’t see the request, or says no when asked to allow recording. If you’re the host, check the waiting room in the first minute or two. If you aren’t, ask the host at the start to let the notetaker in. The docs on admitting the notetaker cover what else you can do.
• Say that it’s there. The other people can see it in the participant list, but a sentence at the start is better. Ines told Felix she records calls so she can listen instead of type, and asked if that was all right.

If a notetaker in the room isn’t welcome, or you can’t count on the host to let it in, the desktop app for Mac and Windows can take private notes instead. With Privately Take Notes chosen and the app open, recording starts on its own when a meeting with a video link begins, and the notes stay visible only to you.

Step 3: Have the conversation

This is the part that needs nothing from Groupthink.

Felix talked for a while about why the old site wasn’t working. Ines watched him while he did. He got animated about one competitor’s site and went quiet about his own team’s last attempt. She asked about the second thing, and the call went somewhere useful. She didn’t write a word.

Step 4: Read what came back

After the call, Groupthink builds a recap and emails it to you and to people you added to the meeting yourself in Groupthink. Calendar guests don’t get it automatically. To send it to them, open the recap and click Send recap to attendees. That button is there when the meeting came from your calendar, when you joined by a link that matches an event on it, or when you have linked someone with an email address to the meeting. Until you link someone, a call that isn’t on your calendar has no guest list, so click Share on the recap, enter the person’s email address and click Share. It goes to one person at a time. The docs on who gets the recap have the details. Private notes go only to you.

The email opens with a short summary and a View Full Recap button, which opens the whole thing in Groupthink, transcript included. Below that are sections for Key Decisions, Tasks (with who said they’d do each one) and Important Notes.

Ines’s recap listed the two decisions from the call and a task for her: send Felix a proposal by the following Friday. Who’s waiting on you? covers where promises like that are kept.

Step 5: Look at the person, not the meeting

The recap is about the meeting. The more useful part is about Felix.

Open Relationships and click the person. Things they mentioned in the call can show up in their Details, marked Suggested. For a call that isn’t on your calendar, Groupthink doesn’t know who it was with until you say. The recap asks Who was this with? and lists the names the notetaker heard. Click Link to Felix Aurand if he is already a contact, Add Felix Aurand if he’s new, or Not them to drop a name. If no names are listed, type the name in the + Add field. Where did that come from? covers how to check one and confirm it. On Felix’s page, Ines found the competitor he kept bringing up and his plan to hire a marketing lead in the spring.

The next time she meets Felix, she can open his page five minutes before and walk in knowing what he cares about, without having taken a single note during the call.

Try it on one call

You don’t have to record everything. Pick one call this week with someone you want to listen to closely. Send the notetaker in with Join by link… when it starts, or let it come on its own. Mention it at the start, and look at them instead of your screen.

If you don’t have Groupthink yet, start free, with 30 days of Pro.