Every meeting you attend now produces a summary, whether you asked for one or not. Copilot recaps it, Zoom's companion emails it, the recorder in your pocket files it. We are, suddenly, the best-summarised workforce in history.
And I'd like to gently point out that being summarised is not the same as having thought, because I've started to watch the two get confused, in others and occasionally in myself, and the confusion has a cost that compounds quietly.
What a summary actually is
A summary is compression. It takes forty minutes of conversation and returns the load-bearing sentences. Done well (and the tools now do it well) it's genuinely valuable: a fair record, retrievable, shareable, a defence against the meeting evaporating entirely. I build summarisation into my own product. This is not a case against summaries.
But notice what compression preserves and what it discards. It keeps what was said. It cannot keep what you noticed while it was being said: the pause before the client agreed, the number that didn't square with last month's, the thing conspicuously not raised. It keeps conclusions and sheds the friction that produced them. And it flattens weight: the throwaway comment and the critical commitment arrive in the same font, in the same bullet list, at the same altitude.
Thinking is precisely the work the summary sheds. It's asking whether the conclusion follows. It's connecting this meeting to the three before it and noticing the drift. It's deciding, of the eleven things said, which one changes what you do tomorrow. A summary hands you the material for that work. It cannot do the work, because the work isn't in the transcript.
The failure mode: reading as a substitute for engaging
Here's the pattern I've watched emerge. The summary arrives, gets skimmed, gets filed, and produces a small, dangerous feeling: handled. The meeting has been processed. Except nothing was processed; something was compressed. The judgement that the meeting actually required (does this change our plan? did we just agree to something we'll regret?) never happened, because the artefact that would once have forced engagement (your own notes, written by your own hand, filtered by your own attention) was replaced by one that requires none.
Multiply across a meeting-heavy week and you get a new kind of professional: perfectly informed, in the shallow sense, about everything, and behind on the thinking about all of it. The summaries are excellent. The synthesis is nobody's job now. It used to be everybody's, by accident, because taking notes forced it.
What I do instead
The fix isn't rejecting the tools; it's repositioning them. A summary is an input to thinking, and the discipline is to bolt one deliberate act of judgement onto every summary you receive. My version is a single question, asked while the recap is still open: what does this change? Sometimes the answer is a task, and it gets captured. The mechanics of that capture — recording to task list — are what make that thirty-second question worth asking in the first place. Sometimes it's "nothing," which is a legitimate answer arrived at, rather than a default arrived by. The question takes thirty seconds. It's the thirty seconds the summary was silently letting me skip.
This is also why, in ka-do, the summary was never designed to be the destination. It's the doorway: to the actions it implies, to the record it belongs to, to the questions you can ask of what was actually said. The compression is in service of the engagement, not a substitute for it.
The uncomfortable one-liner
We didn't automate note-taking. We automated the activity that used to smuggle thinking into our day, and the thinking now has to be scheduled on its own merits. The tools are not the problem. Mistaking their output for the work is.
Ka-do treats every summary as a doorway, not a destination. Try it free →