Catch every promise you made on a client call

You need text to work from.

• You record calls. You already have a transcript. Only record calls where everyone agreed to it.
• You do not record. Paste your rough notes. Say they are notes, so Claude knows they may be incomplete.

Notes work, but they are weaker. You wrote down what felt important at the time, and promises often slip past because they felt small. If you only have notes, write the call date at the top, and add anything you remember saying out loud, even if it feels minor. From notes, the QUOTE column holds your own words, not what was said on the call, and Claude marks each one NOTES. Treat those quotes as reminders, and check any promise you are unsure about with the person who made it.

Check that the transcript shows who said each line. If your recorder labels speakers as Speaker 1 and Speaker 2, swap in real names before you paste. Claude needs to know which lines came from your side and which came from the client, or it cannot sort the promises.

Long calls are usually fine to paste in one go. If your chat refuses the text as too long, split it into two halves and run the prompt on each. Then read both lists together.

A broad summary hides promises inside everything else. Ask for one thing: anything your side said you would do, send, check or fix.

Include the soft ones. "Let me check with the designer" and "we'll look into it" are promises to the person who heard them.

Many promises come with no date, so the prompt has two rules:

1. 1

   Every promise gets a due date. If the call gave none, Claude writes NO DATE and flags it, and you set one.

2. 2

   Every promise gets the exact quote. Claude must never guess what was said.

Why these two? A promise with no date is a promise nobody owns. The quote lets you check Claude's work in ten seconds. You read the line, you remember the moment, and you know whether it was a real promise or small talk.

Fill in the curly-brace parts and paste it into a new chat.

Picture a six-person bookkeeping firm. The owner, Dana, has just finished a 40-minute call with a client who runs a small dental practice. The call was on Tuesday 6 October. Dana pastes the transcript into a new chat, fills in the call date and the names on her side (Dana and her colleague Marcus), and sends the prompt.

Here is a short slice of what could come back:

Claude also lists "We'll look into the payroll setup" as a promise with NO DATE. Because it is vague, it shows up again under QUESTIONS FOR ME, where Claude asks whether it was a real promise.

Dana reads the three quotes against her memory. She does not take Claude's word for any of it. The chart of accounts promise has no date, so she sets Friday 9 October and tells Marcus, since his review comes first. The Thursday item goes straight to Marcus. The payroll line was a throwaway comment, but the client heard "we'll look into it", so Dana adds a small task to reply on it next week. Total time from end of call to a clean list: about ten minutes. Without the list, she would have relied on a half-remembered scribble and probably missed the payroll line completely.

Under THEY PROMISED, the client said they would send last year's tax filing by Friday. Dana adds a Friday afternoon reminder to follow up if it has not arrived.

Notice what the list did. It caught a promise with no date, a promise that belonged to someone else on the team, and a soft promise Dana would have dropped.

This step is yours. Claude finds the promises, and you decide what to do with them.

1. 1

   Read each quote against what you remember.

2. 2

   Set a date for every NO DATE item.

3. 3

   Answer the items under QUESTIONS FOR ME.

4. 4

   Put each promise on your calendar or task list with the due date.

Send the list to your team the same day. If a promise belongs to a colleague, they should hear it from you in writing, not hope they remembered it.

Common mistakes

Pasting only your side of the call. If the client's lines are missing, Claude cannot tell a promise from a question you were answering. Paste the whole call.

Leaving the call date out. "By Thursday" means nothing without today's date. Claude works out the full date from what you type, so a wrong or missing date gives wrong due dates. Always check the weekday it shows against your own calendar.

Skipping the quote check. The quote is there so you can verify. If you accept the list without reading the lines, you are trusting a tool that can misread a joke or a hypothetical as a promise.

Ignoring QUESTIONS FOR ME. This section holds the vague promises, which are the ones clients remember most. Answer each one, even if the answer is "no, we did not commit to that, I will tell them".

Waiting until tomorrow. The sooner you run it, the more you still remember. Memory is what lets you judge the quotes quickly. Run it within the hour.

If Claude keeps missing things, the input is usually the problem. A noisy recording, speaker labels that are wrong, or notes that skipped the small stuff will all give a thinner list. Fix the input first.