Decide if this should have been an email, and structure it if not
The best meeting prep sometimes ends with cancelling the meeting.
- Use it for
- Anyone about to schedule a meeting on autopilot.
Most meetings get scheduled reflexively, not because a meeting is the right format for what needs to happen. If the goal is really "share this information" or "get a yes/no on something simple," a meeting adds scheduling overhead and synchronous cost to something that didn't need either. The honest question — could this be async — rarely gets asked before the invite goes out.
This prompt asks it explicitly, and if the answer is genuinely "no," builds the agenda that makes the meeting worth the room's time.
When not to use this
For anything that's clearly a real discussion — genuine disagreement to work through, brainstorming, relationship-building — don't second-guess the format. This is for the reflexively-scheduled status syncs and check-ins where nobody's actually asked if a meeting is necessary.
Did this work?
You either send an email and cancel the meeting, or walk into a meeting with an actual agenda tied to a decision — not a vague "syncing up."
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.