# Turn messy notes into a useful plan A clean summary, the decisions already made, the open questions, and the next actions, straight from your messy notes. **Time:** 8 minutes **What you'll have when you're done:** A clean summary, decisions, open questions, and next actions. ---Notes taken in the moment, on a phone, in a meeting, mid-thought, rarely come out organized. This turns whatever you actually wrote, half-sentences and all, into something you can act on. --- ## Do this 1. **Paste the notes as they are.** Don't clean them up first; that's the part this does for you. 2. **Say what the notes are about**, in one line, so the summary has context. 3. **Ask for the four-part breakdown**, using the prompt below. 4. **Check the "decisions already made" section especially**, since a note taken quickly can read as a decision when it was really just an option being considered. ``` Here are my notes on [one-line context, e.g. "planning my sister's visit" or "our team's Q3 priorities"]: [paste the notes exactly as they are, incomplete is fine] Turn this into: 1. A clean summary, in plain language 2. Decisions that were already made (only things clearly decided, not things merely discussed) 3. Open questions that still need an answer 4. Next actions, each one specific enough to actually do ``` --- ## Check this before you trust it - **Every item in "decisions already made."** A note that says "maybe Saturday" is not a decision. If this section states something more firmly than your notes actually did, correct it. - **Whether a next action is specific enough.** "Follow up" isn't one. "Call the venue by Friday" is. - **Anything it inferred that you didn't actually write.** Notes are often incomplete on purpose; a gap-filling guess should be flagged, not presented as fact. --- ## If it goes wrong **It invents a decision or a date that isn't in your notes.** This is the single most common failure here, since incomplete notes invite the gaps to be filled in. Ask specifically: "which of these did you infer versus find directly in my notes?" **The next actions are too vague to actually do.** Ask it to rewrite each one as something you could put directly into a calendar or a to-do list, with no interpretation required. **Your notes turn out to be too thin for a useful breakdown.** That's a real finding: it means the notes themselves were the incomplete part, not the summarizing. Go back to whatever the notes were about and fill the gaps before trying again. **The summary reorganizes things in a way that changes the meaning.** Read it against the raw notes once, side by side. A reorganization that quietly shifts emphasis is worth catching before you act on it. ---

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