Meeting Prep Is a Lookup, Not a Decision

Nobody plans to arrive at a call cold. It happens because the previous thing overran, and because remembering what you agreed six weeks ago is exactly the kind of task an interrupted brain is worst at.

That is worth treating as a design problem rather than a character flaw.

The environment you are prepping in#

Microsoft's 2025 telemetry across Microsoft 365 is bleak reading. The average worker is interrupted roughly every two minutes during core hours — around 275 interruptions a day — and communication (meetings, mail, chat) consumes about 60% of the day, leaving 40% for the work itself (Microsoft Work Trend Index: breaking down the infinite workday).

Set that beside the interruption-recovery finding — roughly 23 minutes to return to the original task — and the arithmetic does not resolve. There is no version of "just be more organised" that survives an interrupt every two minutes.

Prep is retrieval, and retrieval is delegable#

Here is the first-principles cut. Preparing for a meeting is two jobs wearing one name:

1. Retrieval. What did we agree last time. What did I promise. What changed since — did they ship, did the invoice clear, did the candidate reply.
2. Judgment. What I want out of this call, what I will concede, what I will not.

Only the second requires you. The first is a query across mail, calendar and notes: it has a correct answer, and you would recognise a wrong one instantly. That is exactly the boundary for what to hand to software.

Most people do neither and improvise. The improvisation is usually fine and occasionally expensive — you re-ask something they answered in writing, or forget you promised pricing, which is how deals quietly die.

The three-question brief#

Everything useful fits in three lines:

Write those three lines before every call and you will be better prepared than almost everyone you meet. The difficulty is not the writing. It is that "before every call" loses to the schedule — which is why this belongs to a machine.

Why an assistant fits here#

Retrieval across your own mail and calendar is unglamorous and mechanical, which is precisely what makes it delegable: there is a right answer, and a wrong one is obvious immediately.

Jarvis does this locally on your Mac. It reads your mail and calendar, keeps your people and projects in on-device memory, and can assemble the three-line brief before the call rather than after you have joined it. Free and open source, Mac-only, 2.0 in beta.

The limit is worth stating plainly: a brief is not a strategy. What you want from the call, and what you will trade for it, stays yours.

The general shape#

A surprising amount of "being organised" is retrieval wearing a costume — remembering the commitment, finding the thread, recalling what changed. Retrieval is something computers have been good at for fifty years. The reason it still lands on you is that the information is scattered across applications that were never designed to answer a question together.

That gap is the actual opportunity, and it is a different one from "chatbot that writes your email".