How to run a meeting an agent can act on

Squirrel is designed to work on normal, messy meetings — people interrupt, tangents happen, half of it is thinking out loud. But there's an unavoidable ceiling: an agent can only act on commitments that were actually made. Four habits raise that ceiling a lot.

1. Say the owner's name

"Someone should look at the drop-off" is not an action item, for software or for humans. "Priya, can you look at the drop-off?" — followed by Priya agreeing — is one. Volunteering counts too, as long as it's out loud and unambiguous.

2. Attach a time, even a rough one

"Before the demo" or "end of week" is enough. Undated tasks are the ones that sit in a backlog forever, and they're also the ones where an agent has to guess — which means asking you instead of just doing it.

3. Mark decisions verbally

A short phrase — "okay, so we're deciding to go with Plan B" — does an enormous amount of work. It separates the conclusion from the twenty minutes of debate that produced it, and it's what makes the decision findable in six months.

4. Spend sixty seconds on read-back

Before anyone drops off, say the commitments out loud: who's doing what, by when, and what's still open. It costs a minute, it catches the misunderstanding that would have cost a week, and it gives any follow-up system — human or otherwise — a clean, unambiguous close.

Every one of these is just "be explicit." Agents don't need you to talk like a robot — they need you to finish your sentences.

Worth noting: teams that adopt these report better meetings regardless of tooling. The habits aren't for the software. The software just stops being the reason you need them.