Welcome to The Productivity Playbook – our running series on tools built to make us faster, sharper, and a little less drained at work. This week: Granola, a very neat AI-powered note-taker that handles the messy parts of meetings so you can actually focus on the people in front of you.
Before I dive in: as always in this series, this is an independent review, not a sponsored post.
Why It Matters
Meetings aren’t going anywhere. But the way we survive them? That’s up for grabs. Too often we spend meetings half-listening while scribbling half-thoughts, only to realize later we missed the actual decision.
“If you’ve ever been “voluntold” to take notes and then realized later you missed the actual decision, you know the pain.”
That’s where AI note-takers step in. They’re everywhere right now, and most do a solid job with transcription. But many are built for sprawling enterprises – overloaded with features that feel heavy if you’re running a smaller, faster-moving team.
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Having worked in creative groups and now building The Subthread, I know how easily ideas vanish when you’re bouncing from one brainstorm to the next. That’s where Granola shines. It’s lightweight, quick, and doesn’t disrupt the flow. Instead, it just catches what you’d otherwise forget.
For those of you who are brand leaders, marketers, creatives, and innovators, that’s the difference between a meeting that builds momentum and one that fizzles out the moment the call ends.
It’s worth noting that teams working on sensitive projects or early ideas, Granola’s privacy setup is reassuring. It never stores raw audio, just the transcript, and everything’s encrypted and private unless you share it.
Granola’s pitch is simple: let AI do the typing, capturing, and organizing so you can show up like an actual human being instead of a frantic court reporter.
Tool Spotlight: Granola
So what’s the big deal? Granola is built to be simple, fast, and refreshingly invisible. Tools like Otter.ai and Fireflies already cover the basics – recording, transcribing, summarizing – and they’re great if you’re managing dozens of meetings across a large org.
Granola feels different. It sits quietly in the background – never intrusive, never “taking over” – which matters in creative settings where extra tools can kill the flow. You forget it’s even there until, at the end, you’ve got a clean set of notes and action items ready to go. That subtlety is, in my opinion, one of its biggest strengths.
On top of that, three features stand out:
The Mobile App – A recent addition and genuinely a game-changer. I can join Zoom or Meet calls from my phone and still have Granola capture everything. I even use it to transcribe in-person brainstorms on the go. For small teams or people constantly moving between calls, clients, and creative sessions, that flexibility is huge.
Zapier Integration – This makes Granola far more than “just a note-taker.” With Zapier, meeting recaps can flow straight into project boards, client folders, or marketing workflows. The beauty is that Granola doesn’t pile on features for the sake of it. It stays light – which means what you pay for actually gets used.
Built with Privacy in Mind – Unlike some note-takers that keep audio files, Granola doesn’t store raw audio. It transcribes in real time, deletes the cache, and keeps only the text. For those of you handling sensitive client work for example, that’s a big reassurance.
The Mini Playbook: How to Use Granola This Week
If you’re curious, here’s how to put Granola to work right away:
- Install & sync – Connect it to your calendar. Yes, it feels creepy at first.
- Tag action items – Highlight follow-ups as they come up, while they’re fresh.
- Share the recap – When the meeting ends, fire off the auto-summary in Slack. Instant hero status.
Pro Tips:
- Use keyword alerts to track recurring themes (budget, campaign, deadlines). It’s a subtle way to spot patterns across projects.
- Automate with Zapier. Send recaps to Trello, Asana, or a shared client folder. That means less admin, less copy-pasting, and faster follow-through.
Final Word
Granola isn’t here to fix meetings (if only). What it does do is make them count. By offloading the grunt work of note-taking, it frees up mental bandwidth to actually think, listen, and contribute.
Otter and Fireflies are excellent if you need enterprise-level coverage. But if you’re in a smaller, creative environment – the kind I know well as we launch The Subthread – Granola hits a different sweet spot. It’s simple, fast, and helps ideas stick without weighing you down.
For the first time in years, I’ve left meetings already knowing what happened – without scrolling through long transcripts or digging for the parts that matter.
The best tools don’t replace how you work. They back you up. That’s when the tech disappears, and you’re free to think more clearly.
For brand leaders, marketers, creatives, and innovators, that means less time chasing meeting notes and more time building on the moments that actually move projects forward. And that’s exactly the kind of practical productivity win worth highlighting in The Playbook.
