I built Gorp for meetings: client calls, 1:1s, the weekly check-in. It works just as well for things that aren’t meetings: interviewing a grandmother about old photos, or recording the one coworker who knows how the month-end close works before she retires. Here’s how I’d use it for each, with a template you can paste in.
Everyday meetings
Each of these has a built-in template. Choose it from the template menu at the top of a meeting, or make it the default in Settings → Templates → Use for new meetings. While My notes is empty, Insert outline puts the headings in for you.
A client call
For most client calls the General template is enough: what matters, decisions, follow-ups. When you’re on the call to learn about their problem rather than report on yours, switch to Customer interview. It sorts the note into their goals, pain points and workarounds, gives you a heading for exact phrases worth hearing again, and is told to keep what they said apart from your reading of it.
If a client rings unannounced on FaceTime, Zoom, Teams, Slack or Webex, Gorp asks once whether to start notes. It never starts recording on its own. Afterwards, Draft follow-up… builds an email from the decisions and actions you confirmed against the recording; you copy it, fix the wording and send it yourself.
Customer interview template
Customer goals
Pain points and workarounds
Exact language worth revisiting
Follow-ups
A 1:1
The 1:1 template starts My notes with three headings, and the written note is told to keep sensitive nuance rather than smooth it over.
If the next one is a video meeting on your calendar, the reminder a minute before opens with what you decided last time, and See brief lists what’s still open, linked to the moment it was said where Gorp knows the passage.
1:1 template
Wins and concerns
Support needed
Commitments
A lecture
Pick Lecture and type “ask about slide 12” whenever you think of it. If you attach the slides, the note is told to keep what the professor said apart from the slide text, and not to invent answers to questions nobody answered.
Sit down with your grandmother and a shoebox of photos. Record one story at a time, note which photo she’s talking about and when, and keep her voice next to the words.
Try one topic and a 20–30 minute conversation first.
Narrator: Rosa; interviewer: Sam
Topic: The old neighborhood
Sharing: family only, review with Rosa first
photo-01-front-porch.jpg — around 06:20
Rosa describes the Sunday visits. Unsure whether the photo is from 1962 or 1963; ask her brother before adding a date.
What Sam typed in My notes while Rosa talked. The date stays a question until her brother can say.
Before Dana retires, record her doing the month-end close once, out loud, with the odd exceptions only she knows. Then have the person taking over try it while you listen back.
Walk the house with the contractor and talk room by room. The template gives you separate headings for what you saw, what they suggested and what you agreed.
Before you switch tasks, talk for thirty seconds about where you stopped, what you tried and what to do next. Tomorrow you start from that instead of from scratch.
Say what you believe right before you decide, and what you expect to happen. Later, compare that with what did happen, without rewriting the first entry.
Everything on this page works in the current Mac preview. Gorp’s own iPhone recorder is coming; until then, record on your phone with Voice Memos and import the file on your Mac.
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