A recap is a short account of what you now understand, sent while the client can still correct you cheaply. Two hours after the meeting is about the right moment. The reason has less to do with speed than with how fast a correction stops being free.
- The value of a recap is the reply that comes back saying the second point is slightly off. That one line is worth more than anything else that happened that morning.
- Two hours is long enough to have thought, and short enough that the client is still in the meeting. Write it in the parking lot and you get what was said. Send it the next morning and somebody at their company has already retold the meeting.
- Write it in the client’s own nouns. Translate it into your vocabulary and it reads like a template with the details dropped in. It confirms nothing.
- Most of a meeting stays out of the email. The disagreement between two people on their side reads differently in writing. So does the thing said in frustration, and so does the idea that was still half formed.
The job only the recap does
Three different things come out of a meeting by email. They’re three emails, even when they travel together.
One gets the actions done. That’s small scale project management conducted in writing, and it lives on names, verbs and dates. Another is the record, so that eleven months later there’s a dated message rather than a firm recollection. Both are real, both have a craft of their own, and both are taken separately.
The third is the recap, and it’s the one that can still change something. Its job is to establish that you and the client walked out of the same meeting.
That sounds soft until you price the alternative. On the day it forms, a misunderstanding about what the problem is costs nothing. In week six it costs a workstream. Somewhere between those two points a clarification turns into a difficult conversation about why you’ve spent a month on the wrong thing. The recap is the last moment when the fix is still free. You’re buying a correction while corrections are cheap.
There’s a second return, and it arrives faster. A client reads your recap and thinks yes, that’s exactly it. They’ve just decided that you understand their business. In the first month of an engagement that judgment gets made continuously, on very little evidence. A paragraph that states their problem back to them more clearly than they stated it does more for that judgment than your first deliverable will. It takes about eleven minutes to write.
This is where a recap differs from minutes, and it’s the one distinction worth spending. Minutes are complete, neutral and authorless. A recap is partial and has a point of view, which is the entire reason anybody reads it. Minutes say what happened. A recap says what it means and what follows. If yours could have been produced by somebody with no opinion about the work, it’s minutes, and it’ll be treated as minutes.
Why two hours
The two ways to get the timing wrong are opposite, and about equally common.
Send it from the parking lot and you write down what was said, because at that distance that’s all you have. Everything is still settling. The loudest moment of the meeting takes up more room than the important one, and the sentence you can quote crowds out the conclusion you drew. A recap written inside ten minutes is transcription with the tone improved.
Send it the next morning and something else has happened, and your memory has little to do with it. Your contact has already told a colleague how the meeting went. That retelling is the version in their head now, and they made it on their own. Your recap lands on a page that’s already written, and it argues, politely and at a disadvantage, with the account that got there first. Overnight is also long enough for somebody to act on their version of what was agreed.
Two hours buys the one thing that makes the email worth sending, which is a single pass of thought. The difference between hour zero and hour two is one sentence, the one that says what the meeting meant rather than what it contained. That sentence is why the client reads any of it. It’s a short process. It’s the walk to the station, or the twenty minutes before your next call, spent deciding what you now think.
The other half of the argument is how long the client’s correction stays cheap for them. At two hours, telling you that the second point is slightly off is a clarification, and it’s free to them. At three days it’s a second thought, and people are reluctant to have second thoughts in writing in front of colleagues. So a late recap collects fewer corrections than an early one, and the quiet reads like agreement. What you’re hearing is the timing.
Two useful bounds sit around that. It goes the same day, every time. And if you know when their next internal conversation on the subject is, it goes before that. If the day genuinely fills up, send four lines within the two hours saying the position and what follows, then send the fuller note tomorrow. That works when tomorrow’s note actually arrives. A placeholder with nothing behind it is worse than a late recap.
One deliberate reason to hold something back is a number you can’t yet stand behind. Send the recap anyway. Say the figure follows, say when, and keep everything else moving. A recap missing one line is still a recap. A recap that arrives on Thursday is a document.
The paragraph at the top
The first paragraph is the recap. Everything under it is support, and a good share of your readers stop before it.
It carries three things. What the meeting was and when. The problem or the position as you now understand it. And what happens next from your side, with a date.
The temptation is to open with thanks for their time and a line about a useful discussion. As a clause that’s fine, and even pleasant. As a paragraph it spends the one part of the email some people read on furniture.
The difference shows in a pair of openings. Here’s the first. Thanks for your time this morning, it was a useful session and I have summarized the key points below. Here’s the second. From this morning, orders confirmed after two o’clock miss the next day’s picking run. The delay is in the confirmation step rather than in the warehouse, so I will come back on Thursday the eleventh with what each of the two fixes would cost. The first could have been written before the meeting, by anybody, about any client. The second could only have been written by somebody who was there and has thought about it since.
That’s the test, and it’s quick. Could this paragraph have been written before the meeting? If it could, it’s furniture, and the recap starts below it.
The paragraph is also doing something quieter. It puts your understanding on the table rather than theirs. That’s the offer. If the client thinks the delay is in the warehouse, they now have a specific sentence to push against, and they will. A recap that only reflects what they told you hands them their own words back, and disagreement is what you’re shopping for.
Write it in their words
Use the client’s nouns. They say the depot, so you write the depot, even where your own notes say distribution center. They call a system the old one, so you call it the old one, and you put its real name in brackets once for the reader who missed the meeting.
This matters more than it sounds. Consultants translate constantly, out of habit, because putting a problem in your own frame is how you think about it at all. The cost is that the client reads a description of a company that’s almost theirs. Every substituted word adds a small amount of distance. By the fourth one, what the recap confirms is your version of a conversation rather than the conversation.
Where they were vague, be specific and let them correct you. Soon becomes a date you propose. Most of the sites becomes the four you believe they mean, named. The point is to give them a definite thing to say no to, because nobody ever corrected the word most.
Report what was agreed, and leave out who said it. Putting a sentence in quotation marks with a name attached changes the register from a summary to evidence. A client reading their own words quoted back at them will start reading the whole email for what it’s being built into.
Three phrases make three different claims. Use the strong one loosely and the recap turns into something the client has to fight.
We agreed means both of you committed to it, out loud, and both of you expect to see it in writing. Save it for that.
My understanding is is the workhorse of the entire email. It’s your reading, offered for correction. It makes disagreeing with you an ordinary act rather than a challenge, and most of a good recap is written in it.
You mentioned parks something on the record without accepting it. The idea keeps, it’s there when somebody asks for it later, and you’ve committed to nothing by writing it down.
Name the line you are least sure of
A recap written in uniform confidence comes back quiet, and quiet is ambiguous. The client who agrees and the client who skimmed it look identical for about three weeks.
So say where the edge is. One sentence, near the top. The one I am least sure about is the second: I took it that the pilot runs on one site rather than three.
That sentence does three things at once. It gives a reply somewhere to land, which is most of why replies happen. It turns correcting you from a confrontation into a small kindness, which is a much easier thing for a busy person to do. And it shows that you were listening closely enough to know where your own understanding ran out, which reads as competence.
Use it once, or at most twice. Four hedged lines is a questionnaire, and the client will fairly conclude that you lost the thread of the meeting.
If the uncertain line genuinely matters and the reply stays away, ask again once, naming it. On the pilot, one site or three. Sign off with an invitation to say if anything looks wrong and you’ve handed the reader the job of hunting for the error, which is real work, so they skip it. Threads that went quiet look identical to threads that are finished, and that’s the whole difficulty with them.
When the answer still stays away, work from your version and say so plainly. I will work from this unless I hear otherwise. That’s honest, and it reads as honest, provided what you do next is small and reversible. If the thing waiting on the answer is expensive, leave it where it is and pick up the phone. A recap is a good instrument for catching a misunderstanding and a poor one for extracting a decision.
What stays out of it
A meeting contains a great deal that stays out of the written account, and most recaps that go wrong go wrong here rather than in what they leave out.
The disagreement on their side. Two people in the client’s team clearly disagree, and everybody in the room saw it. Writing it down makes you a participant, and hands one of them a document authored by their external adviser. Record the outcome. If the meeting ended without one, record that, and leave out who was on which side.
The thing the senior person said that was wrong. It needs correcting, and a recap addressed to eight people is the worst available place for it. A recap is a bad place to be right. Correct it directly, to one person, in a separate message or a call.
Ideas that were still half formed. Somebody thinking out loud is thinking out loud. Write it down and it becomes a proposal. This matters most for anything that sounds like additional work, because on the page a musing starts to look like an offer you’ve made.
Your read on who’s holding things up. It’s usually accurate. It stays with you.
What was said after the meeting ended. The corridor, the elevator, the walk to reception. People speak differently in that gap, on an unstated understanding that it’s off the record, and they’re right to. If you need something from it, ask first.
Tone commentary of any kind. There was clearly some frustration on the operations side. Leave it out. Describe the position, and let the weather stay outside.
Underneath all of those sits one thing to watch in yourself, which is the recap written to build a case. Write to protect your position rather than to establish a shared understanding and the client feels it, and every meeting after that one is worse. Where you genuinely do need something on the record, say that one thing plainly and briefly, and let the rest of the email be a recap. A note that’s nine tenths defensive and one tenth summary reads as nine tenths defensive.
After a meeting that went badly
This is the recap you least want to write, and the one that returns the most.
Write it the same day, in a register flatter than you feel. The flatness is the craft. A hard meeting reported in ordinary, level sentences tells the client that you can be relied on when things go badly, and that impression is worth more than the meeting cost you.
Keep the substance as hard as it was. If the meeting resolved nothing, say that it resolved nothing and say what happens next. A recap that quietly reads as though the meeting went fine is the document the client will remember six weeks later, and they’ll remember it against you.
Leave the atmosphere out, and apologize only for what’s yours. If a decision went against you and you gave your view in the room, record the decision accurately. Record your view once, in one sentence, where you gave it formally. Then stop. A recap that relitigates is the only part of the meeting anybody will reread.
If somebody on the client’s side was criticized in front of you, the recap passes over it. That’s honest reporting. The outcome is the record, and the weather stays outside.
Two things belong somewhere other than a difficult recap. Anything significant reaches your contact by voice first, so if the meeting produced real bad news, tell them before the recap lands and let the email be the record of it. And if what actually happened is that the work you agreed to has changed shape, that’s a conversation with a price attached, and saying no to it without damaging the relationship is taken separately in this collection.
Who reads it who was not there
A recap is the most forwarded email a consultant sends. On most of them, the people reading it from a forward outnumber the people who sat in the room.
For all of them, the recap is the meeting. It’s the whole account they get. A remark that was obviously light in the room lands flat on the page. A piece of shorthand four people share is opaque to a fifth. And the person whose opinion decides whether the engagement continues is very often reading your recap and stopping there, forming a view of an hour they spent elsewhere from four hundred words you wrote in twenty minutes.
So your default reader is the one who read it from a forward. Write for them, and let the people who were in the room skim. How to write anything so it survives a forward, and how to keep several stakeholders with different needs from ending up in separate threads, are each taken separately in this collection.
That reader also sets the length, and length is the question people usually get backwards. How much was contested decides it. The length of the meeting barely enters into it. A ninety minute session that produced one clear decision is four lines. A forty minute call that reopened what the engagement covers might take most of a page, and should. Nobody has ever complained that a recap was too short when it held the thing they needed.
When not to send one at all
The recap is a good default and a bad habit. Knowing where it stops is part of using it well.
The standing call where nothing changed. A recap after every weekly check-in teaches the client that recaps can be skipped, and that lesson carries straight over to the one that mattered. Nothing new, next call on the fourteenth, is the correct email. Why repetition trains a reader to stop opening things is taken separately in this collection, and it applies here exactly.
When the client already circulates notes. Two records of one meeting is worse than one, and the second one to arrive reads as a set of corrections whatever it says. Reply into theirs instead. What to do when their version and yours genuinely differ has rules of its own, and it’s handled elsewhere.
A working session where you and the client are effectively one team. Recap the decisions weekly. Recapping the sessions produces a stream of documents about a document.
A meeting that was really a sales conversation. What you send after a scoping call or a pitch is a different email doing a different job, and this collection takes it separately.
A meeting where you were a guest rather than a participant. Sitting in the room makes you a guest, and volunteering a written account of somebody else’s internal meeting is a strange thing to do uninvited.
And if the recap would be the fourth thing you’ve sent one person since lunch, look at the other three. There’s a limit to how much a client absorbs before they stop reading any of it, and finding that limit is a separate piece of work covered elsewhere here.
What Point changes about the two hours
Every decision above belongs to you. What you understood, what you leave out, which line you admit to being unsure about, how flat to pitch a difficult one: that’s the job, and it stays yours. Two things around the edge are mechanical, and they’re the ones that most often go wrong. Whether the two hours exist at all. And what you have in front of you when they do.
The two hours are the first thing a full mailbox eats. You come out of a meeting into forty new messages. By the time they’ve been dealt with it’s five o’clock, and the recap gets written from memory, or tomorrow. In Point the feed leads with what actually needs you today, and every conversation carries a plain account of itself, so the forty become a pass of a few minutes rather than an afternoon. That matters here more than it would elsewhere, because the gap is the whole method.
Writing from the record rather than from memory is the other half. A recap has to square with what this client told you three weeks ago, and that usually sits in a thread you’d have to go hunting for. Open a long chain at its current position, or find something by what you remember about it rather than the words it used, and the recap reflects the engagement rather than the last hour of it.
A recap is also a document full of dates, most of them yours. A promise made inside a message comes back with its date attached, so your memory gets the day off. The thing you asked of them comes back the same way. The correction you invited works the same way too. If the reply to your least certain line stays away, that’s an open loop rather than an agreement, and it comes back to you before it goes cold.
Some of this really is typing, and typing is the part a tool is entitled to take. Point writes new messages as well as replies, and picks up your own habits of phrasing. Five rough lines about what you took from the room come back as a draft you correct, instead of a blank window at four o’clock. Read the sentences reporting what the client said hardest of all. A model working from thin notes writes fluently and confidently about a room it was never in, and a recap is a document of claims about another person’s words.
How far Point goes alone is set for each type of action separately, and every one of them starts at review. A recap is a type worth leaving at review for good, however far you raise the others, because it’s made of statements about what a paying client said. What that dial actually controls repays ten minutes before you move it.
Three limits are worth saying plainly. Point wasn’t in the room. Point holds your mail and your calendar, not a transcript, so the raw material for the recap is still whatever you wrote down yourself. Whether you’ve understood the client’s business sits outside what Point can see, and that’s the one thing this entire guide is about. And undo covers what Point did, and stops at the edge of your own mailbox, so a recap that has landed on somebody else’s server stays there. That’s one more argument for the two hours being two hours of thought rather than two hours of delay.
A recap is built out of things a client told you in confidence. Where that material is allowed to go is worth deciding on purpose, rather than by whatever tab was open. The questions to put to a vendor are set out separately.
You keep your address. Point works on top of a Gmail or Microsoft account you already have, and the client keeps writing to you where they always did. The whole capability list sits on benefits, the case for a consulting practice specifically is on Point for consultants, and the product is where to start.
Common questions
How soon after a client meeting should I send a recap?
The same day, and about two hours afterwards if the day allows it. Ten minutes is too soon. At that distance you write down what was said rather than what it meant, and the meaning is the part the client is paying for. The next morning is late for a different reason. By then your contact has already described the meeting to somebody internally, that description is the version in their head, and your recap has to argue with an account that arrived first. Two hours gives you one pass of thought while the client is still close enough to the conversation that correcting you feels like a clarification. If the day makes that impossible, send four lines inside the window and the fuller note tomorrow, and then actually send it.
What is the difference between a recap and meeting minutes?
Minutes are complete, neutral and authorless. They record what happened, in order, without a view. A recap is short and partial and has a point of view: it says what you now understand the position to be and what follows from that. The difference matters because they fail differently. Minutes fail by being inaccurate. A recap fails by being generic, and the test is whether the opening paragraph could have been written before the meeting by somebody who stayed at their desk. If your client’s own project office already circulates minutes, reply into theirs with the understanding that’s yours to add, and let one record of the meeting stand.
What do I do if the client never replies to my recap?
Take the silence for what it usually is, which is neither agreement nor disagreement. A recap that needs no reply is doing its job. What needs an answer is the specific line you were unsure about, so ask again once, naming it in a single short question rather than inviting the reader to tell you if anything is wrong. If the answer still stays away and what depends on it is small and reversible, say you’ll work from your version unless you hear otherwise, and get on with it. If what depends on it is expensive, stop emailing and call, because a recap is a good instrument for surfacing a misunderstanding and a poor one for forcing a decision.
Should I send a recap after every client call?
No, and sending one after every call is how they stop being read. A standing weekly check-in that produced nothing new deserves one line saying so and the date of the next one. Reserve the recap for meetings where something was decided, where the shape of the problem moved, or where the room held people who rarely speak to you. The other case for skipping it is a client whose own team already writes notes, where a second version arriving later reads as corrections however carefully it’s phrased.
The client said something in the meeting that was wrong. Should I correct it in the recap?
Correct it directly and privately, to one person, on the same day, and keep it out of a recap that goes to eight people. That goes double where the person who said it is the most senior name on the distribution list. A recap is a bad place to be right, because being publicly corrected by an external adviser is remembered long after the point itself is forgotten. Then let the recap record the position accurately, and leave the difference between that and what was said in the room where it is. Where the mistake is material to what you’re about to do, the correction is a phone call rather than any kind of email.
How long should a meeting recap email be?
As long as the contested part of the meeting, which usually has very little to do with how long the meeting ran. A ninety minute session that produced one clear decision is four lines. A forty minute call that reopened what the engagement covers may take most of a page and should. Write for the reader who missed the room, because they’re usually the majority and your recap is the only account they get, then let the people who were there skim. The one length that’s always wrong is the recap padded to look thorough, because everything in it that was already obvious to the reader lowers the value of the sentence next to it.
The short version
A recap establishes that you and the client walked out of the same meeting. Its return is the reply telling you that the second point is slightly wrong, which is free today and expensive in week six. Send it the same day, about two hours out. That’s soon enough that the client can still correct you while it still feels like a clarification, and late enough that you’ve had one pass of thought and can write what the meeting meant rather than what it contained. Open with a paragraph that could only have been written after the meeting, in the client’s own nouns, stating the problem as you now understand it and what you’ll do next with a date on it. Say plainly which line you’re least sure about, because a uniformly confident recap collects silence and silence tells you nothing. Keep out the disagreement on their side, the senior person’s mistake, the half formed idea that will read as an offer, and any observation about the mood in the room. After a bad meeting, write it flatter than you feel and keep the substance as hard as it was. Remember that most of your readers missed the room, and that they set both the vocabulary and the length. And when nothing was decided, when the client already writes their own notes, or when the real subject is a change to the work, another email does the job better, and three of those four are taken elsewhere in this collection.