Turning Meeting Notes into Tasks: My Plaud, Obisidian, and OmniFocus Workflow
I attend an inordinate number of meetings each day, and a huge amount of information gets transferred. Much of it needs to be turned into tasks and managed as projects, and sometimes days go by before I can process the meeting notes.
In the past few months, I’ve been using Plaud as a note-taking device so I can focus on what’s being said in the meeting rather than capture everything in writing.
I’ll probably write a whole blog post about that later.
1. Plaud captures the meeting
Plaud (a small AI voice recorder) records the conversation and, shortly after, generates an AI summary note for it — participants, topic-by-topic notes, action items, and an “AI Suggestions” section that flags loose ends the meeting didn’t resolve. Each recording gets a unique file ID and a permanent URL in the Plaud web app (https://web.plaud.ai/file/<id>) where I can always go back and listen to the original audio or read the full transcript.
While I initially added the link back to the Plaud website so that I could check transcripts when needed, it turned out I never really needed to do this. Plaud formats the notes so nicely that sometimes it’s just easier to click the link and go back to the Plaud online version and process from there.
2. Syncing new notes automatically
Rather than opening the Plaud app and hunting for what’s new, I have a Claude Code skill (plaud-notes-sync) that:
- Checks a small state file to see which recordings it’s already pulled
- Lists everything new since a given date
- Pulls just the AI summary (not the full transcript — that’s a deliberate choice to keep these notes skimmable)
- Writes each one out as its own Markdown file in
~/Downloads, with YAML frontmatter (file ID, a direct link back to the note in Plaud, date, and anunprocessed-plaud-notetag)
That tag is the important part — it’s how I know, at a glance, which notes I haven’t reviewed yet, no matter where they’ve since been filed. It’s also easy to create a base that shows only notes with the unprocessed tag on them, as some days it gets to be 2 or 3 days before I can get back to my meeting notes and process them
3. From note to task
Once a note lands in ~/Downloads, I drop it into Obsidian in my main note vault, read through it, and pull out anything that’s actually actionable for me. For a single task, that’s usually:
- Select the relevant line(s) of text
- Use the Obsidian Send to OmniFocus plugin to send it to OmniFocus
- Fine-tune the task in OmniFocus’s Quick Entry panel before saving
4. Why this shape
A few deliberate choices worth calling out:
- Summary-only sync. Transcripts are noisy; I only want the distilled version showing up as a file I have to deal with.
- Tag-based “unprocessed” tracking, not folder-based. Files move around (get filed into other notes, get archived) — a tag survives that; a folder location doesn’t.
- The Plaud link is non-negotiable. AI summaries can misattribute a comment or flatten nuance. The link is the escape hatch back to ground truth.
What’s next
This is still a fairly manual last mile — I still have to read the note and decide what’s task-worthy. The next iteration I’m considering is having the sync step also flag lines that look like action items (the notes already have a dedicated Action Items section) so triaging is faster.