Ask what's gone quiet, not just what's new

When you ask an AI tool to turn your notes into a 1:1 agenda or a team update, the obvious instruction is "tell me what's new since last time." That's useful, but it's not the instruction that finds the thing you actually need to raise. Ask it to flag what's gone quiet instead - the item that was live last time and simply hasn't come up since.

Here's why that matters more than it sounds: something genuinely resolved tends to get mentioned - someone says "that's sorted" or the ticket closes. Something that's gone quiet without being resolved usually means it's stuck, been quietly deprioritised, or someone's avoiding raising it. None of those show up if you only ask "what's new" - by definition, nothing new happened to the thing that stalled.

A model working from your own notes can spot this pattern easily if you ask for it directly - anything mentioned last time that doesn't appear at all in what's happened since. That's not a summarisation task, it's a comparison task, so it needs to be asked for explicitly: "compare this list to last time's and tell me what dropped off without being resolved," not "summarise what's new."

Next time you're prepping any recurring check-in from your own notes, add that one instruction. The stalled item it surfaces is usually worth more of the conversation than everything that's actually moving on its own.