Taming the Multiverse with Plaud
In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Evelyn spends the whole film snapping between dimensions of a multiverse, trying to live a dozen versions of her life at once. Most of my days feel uncomfortably close to that. I bounce between running a company as CEO, playing amateur CFO, serving as a virtual CTO for a handful of businesses, coaching colleagues, volunteering, chasing the next adventure, and handling the half-dozen other roles that show up whether I invited them or not.
Each one feeds the others. That is the good news.
The bad news is that somewhere in all that motion, the important stuff slips. The action item from a hallway conversation. The thing I promised to follow up on. The number someone mentioned that I needed to remember. Keeping track of all of it by hand is close to impossible. It's like trying to run payroll, change the oil, answer the phone, and land a helicopter at the same time. Eventually, something is going to smoke.
The best money I've spent in a long time fixed that. It's a small device called a Plaud, and it has earned its keep so completely that I now carry two.
Plaud is a little recorder I clip on or stick to the back of my phone, and it transcribes the conversations I have throughout the day. My calendar gets loud, conversations pile up, and by Friday I used to have no reliable way to know what I'd missed. Now I run a quick daily or weekly review against accurate transcripts, and far less falls through the cracks. There's a desktop app too, so the online meetings I join but don't host get captured and summarized the same way. I'm no longer at the mercy of whether someone else remembered to hit record, which in business terms is roughly the same as trusting your entire sales forecast to the intern's sticky note.
The first payoff surprised me. I stopped taking notes. No great loss, my handwriting has the legibility of a Starbucks receipt left in a hot car.
When I'm not scribbling action items or half-listening while I write, I'm actually in the conversation, present with the person in front of me. That matters. I can say "action item for Dave" out loud in the middle of a meeting and find it waiting for me in the summary at the end. The follow-ups practically write themselves, and they go out faster because I'm not trying to reconstruct the meeting from memory three hours later like some sleep-deprived crime scene detective.
For an AI-enabled executive, this is where it gets interesting. Plaud connects to the tools I already use through Zapier, a command line, and an MCP, so a finished transcript can flow straight into OneDrive or Google Drive the moment a conversation ends, and into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot, whichever I'm working in that day. From there I build a simple, searchable catalog of everything I've discussed. Here's what matters: a voice conversation carries far more context and nuance than an email or chat thread ever will. You capture the real thinking: the hesitation, the emphasis, the side comment, the actual intent. Not the cleaned-up version that gets shaved down and sanitized three days later. That's where the gold is.
Here's the workflow that changed how fast I move. Before a meeting, I'll have an AI agent summarize the open issues on an initiative and draft a list of questions. I take that list and my Plaud into the conversation, talk it through, and feed the transcript right back to the agent to finish the plan, the proposal, or whatever else I'm building.
In a fast-moving, fast-growing organization, that's a real accelerator, and not in the fake "digital transformation" CIO Magazine buzzword sense. The work comes together faster, with better context, fewer dropped balls, and a clearer record of how we got there. Because every conversation is archived, I know exactly where a piece of information came from. No guessing. No spelunking through Teams chats. No asking, "Didn't somebody say something about that in a meeting?" like we're all sitting around a campfire trying to remember the good old non-digitally-transformed days.
The moment it really earned its keep was last November. I sat down with our finance consultant to build a new way of measuring profitability across the different departments of our business. We did some genuinely good work in that room, and then the holidays ran us over. By the time the dust settled, the two of us remembered the win the way you remember a great dream: vividly, and with absolutely none of the details.
Months later, I pulled that three-hour transcript out of the Plaud web app, handed it to Claude, and watched it rebuild the whole thing from a conversation I'd had nearly four months earlier: a new chart of accounts and a working financial model. What would have been a "let's try to recreate that meeting from memory" afternoon turned into something we could act on in minutes. I've even built little skills that pull the action items out of a transcript and recommend which colleague should own each one.
That last part matters more than it sounds. In a growing company, the bottleneck is rarely effort. It's usually memory, clarity, or handoff. The thing didn't die because nobody cared. It died because it got trapped in somebody's head, right next to "order more coffee" and "why is the printer angry again?"
And it's not just me. We buy these for a lot of our team, because the use cases grow almost daily.
One of my favorites is our infrastructure sales and project lead. He wears one while he walks a site, whether he's estimating a new job or reviewing progress on one already underway. He just talks, and that dictation becomes the notes that turn into the quote and the proposal, or the spoken pass that validates a punch list, along with the dozen other things that always surface during an inspection. By the time he's back at his desk, half the work is already written. Another came up with a novel use: transcribing conversations with his kids to pull the best moments and stories into his journal.
That's not a gimmick. That's leverage. It's the difference between carrying a wheelbarrow full of loose details back to the office and having the lumber already cut, stacked, and labeled when you arrive.
A couple of details keep it earning its place. I write my own prompts so it summarizes things in exactly the style I want, and I load our terms and acronyms into a custom dictionary, so the transcripts come back spelled right and far richer for it. And when your Teams, Zoom, or Google transcription falls short, or you're one of the three people still on Webex, you just export the audio, drop it into the Plaud web app, and get something actually worth reading.
I carry two for a reason. The Plaud Note Pin clips on when I start my day, so if I land in an unplanned conversation, I can start recording with one tap on my phone. It gives me control over the microphone gain, and it has transcribed a lunch meeting cleanly in a loud, busy restaurant. A big deal when you have to remember the key commitment from a client lunch while the waiter is describing the halibut like it just graduated from MIT. The Plaud Note Pro lives on the back of my iPhone, always ready for a meeting in a room full of people or a conversation in a client's office.
I'll give you the one thing that drives me up the wall, though. The Note Pro takes its sweet time syncing back to my phone, long enough that I've stood there watching the progress bar the way you watch a microwave count down from 0:09, as if staring at it will make it go faster. I keep wishing these things had a simple USB port so I could plug into a Mac or PC and dump everything to the cloud in a fraction of the time. It's the one piece of friction I haven't been able to engineer around.
These devices have an ROI that keeps growing. They've become valuable enough to me that I now give them as gifts to executives and tech champions at our customers.
If you find yourself snapping between dimensions of your own multiverse, losing good thinking in the noise, go take a look at Plaud. It's a force multiplier, and it has done more than anything else to tame my particular brand of chaos.
And if your team is drowning in conversations, half-promises, half-written notes, and "somebody should probably follow up on that" moments, reach out to us. We can help you think through where a tool like this fits into a real AI strategy.
Because the future of work isn't about having more meetings. It's about turning the conversations you're already having into action, clarity, and momentum.
Disclosure: I have no affiliate relationship with Plaud and earn nothing if you buy one. I'm just a fan who pays for these out of my own pocket, and buys them for my team and customers.