Techy Surgeon Tutorials: How I Automate Meeting Notes & Action Items with Granola’s Ambient Recorder and Claude

Hey there Techy Surgeon friends. If you’re juggling hospital rounds, startup stand-ups, and hip fracture surgery, you know the whiplash of back-to-back video calls. I take a hard pass on the idea of manually turning all that chatter into usable notes and follow-up items.

I wanted to capture the workflow I use with Granola’s ambient recorder (plus a little Claude magic) to capture, query, and visualize meetings before the coffee even cools.

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1. Low-Friction Setup

1. Install Granola (desktop or Chrome).

2. Connect your calendar—this makes a big difference. Now every meeting auto-spawns a recorder tab the second you hop on Zoom/Teams/Meet.

3. Pick the right mic in settings so your audio doesn’t sound like a potato getting tapped over and over again.

That’s literally it. No bots to invite or creepy black “company.ai notetaker” in your meeting no slash commands, no “Oops, did we hit record?” anxiety. However, I do recommend disclosing that you are using a device during your meetings

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2. Let the Bot Take notes

• During the call: Granola transcribes in real time and tags speakers.

• After the call: It spits out an instant summary and an “Action Items” list.

• Folder trick: For recurring meetings, shove the first transcript into a new folder (e.g., “Weekly Stand Up”). Every future session in that series lands there automatically—your own mini knowledge base that you can query (see below)

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3. Talking to Your Notes (GPT-Style)

Inside any transcript or folder, fire off questions like:

“Summarize key decisions in two bullet points.” “What tasks did we assign to Dr. Patel?”

Granola’s GPT layer digs through the text and answers with reasonable and contextually relevant details.

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4. Implementation Tips from the Trenches

• Hit pause when it gets noisy or chaotic. If someone barges into clinic shouting orders or you get a phone call, tap Pause so the transcript doesn’t turn into word salad.(and then rememeber to start it up again)

• Pipe summaries straight to Slack. You can hook Granola to #project-channel so the recap lands while the meeting’s still warm.

• Friday recap ritual. Each Friday ask the folder, “Draft a one-paragraph weekly update email.” Copy, paste, send, enjoy your weekend.

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5. Claude Prompt Pack: Turning Notes into Quick Visuals

Need pictures, not paragraphs? Drop the raw transcript or action-item list into Claude (Anthropic) and let it whip up charts or tables. My go-to prompts: