LocalBridge

Day to day work template - 2 to 6 tabs

Meeting prep prompt template

Ten minutes before a meeting you do not need a summary of the background. You need the three things you must not get wrong and the questions worth asking.

The prompt

I have a meeting shortly. Build me a brief from these sources.

Meeting: [WHO, AND WHAT IT IS ABOUT]
My role in it: [WHAT YOU NEED TO ACHIEVE]

Give me:
1. Must-know: the five facts I would look uninformed not knowing. One line each, with the source.
2. State of play: where this stood at the end of the last exchange, and what is still open.
3. Questions to ask: five, ordered by how much the answer would change my next move.
4. Likely pushback: the two objections most likely to come at me, and the evidence for each from these sources.
5. Landmines: anything unresolved or sensitive that I should not raise cold.

Rules:
- One page maximum. I am reading this in the corridor.
- No background section. Assume I know the context.
- Mark anything you are inferring rather than reading.

Why this prompt is written this way

The one-page limit and the ban on a background section are doing the work. Left to itself an assistant writes the background, because it is the easiest part to generate from the sources.

Ordering questions by how much the answer changes your next move turns a list into a plan. Most prep produces questions ordered by topic, which is useless under time pressure.

The landmines section catches what a summary never surfaces: the thing that is unresolved and that someone in the room is sensitive about.

Getting more out of it

  • Say what you need to achieve, not just what the meeting is about. The brief changes completely between informing and deciding.
  • Include the last thread as well as the documents. State of play lives in messages, not docs.
  • Read section 5 first if you are short on time.
  • Keep the brief afterwards and append the outcome. It becomes the source for the next one.

Works best with

2 to 6 tabs open at once. Send them together rather than one at a time, so the assistant can compare them instead of forgetting the first by the time it reads the last. Sending tabs to Claude explains the options.

Common questions

How far ahead should I run this?
Right before works fine, which is the point. If the sources are already open in tabs, the whole thing takes a minute.
Will it know what happened in previous meetings?
Only from what you send. Include the notes or the thread, or state of play will be reconstructed from guesswork and marked as inferred.
Is it appropriate for external meetings?
Yes, with the usual caution about what you send to an assistant. Check your employer's policy and leave out anything confidential you would not paste by hand.

Other templates

Stop pasting tabs one by one

LocalBridge sends the pages you have open into Claude or ChatGPT in one click, so this template gets the sources it needs.

See how it works