Good meetings start before the meeting. But prep usually means digging: who is this person again, what did we decide last time, what is still open, what should I cover. That is the scramble in the five minutes before the call, if it happens at all.
This guide gets you out of that scramble, and along the way it teaches a pattern you will reach for constantly in Tana: do something once by asking, capture it as a skill so it runs the same way every time, then hand that skill to an agent so it happens without you. Meeting prep is the example. The climb from a one-off ask, to a reusable skill, to a scheduled agent is the real lesson.
From one ask to automatic prep
Open a chat and say who and what: "Prep me for my 2pm with Acme. Pull what we decided last time, any open issues they reported, and who I am meeting."
Tana drafts the prep from your team's own record: the past meetings with these people, the decisions that came out of them, the issues still open, and the people involved. With your CRM connected it folds in the deal and contact history. Because it works within your permissions and only from what your team actually recorded, the result is grounded in real context, not a generic briefing.
Spend a moment getting the shape right, which items to pull and how to lay them out, because that shape is the thing you are about to make permanent.
You do not want to retype that prompt before every meeting, and you want the prep to come out the same way each time. That is exactly what a skill is: reusable AI instructions you write once and run whenever you need them.
The fastest way to make one is to ask. Right after Tana gives you a prep you like, tell it to "save that as a skill called Meeting prep", and it turns the instructions it just followed into a reusable skill, no setup and no prompt engineering. You can still open and edit it by hand, or build one from the create menu, but describing it to the AI is the normal path. Either way a skill is just a title, a short description, and the recipe in its body: pull the last meeting's decisions, the attendee's open issues, who they are, the CRM history if it is connected, laid out as talking points. From then on, anyone runs that prep by typing / in a chat and picking the skill, then naming the meeting to prep, instead of describing the whole thing from scratch.
Here is why this step matters more than it looks. The prep becomes consistent, every meeting gets the same thorough treatment, with nothing dropped in a rush. And because skills are shared, a teammate covering your call runs the identical skill and walks in just as prepared. A skill is how you capture a good way of working once so the whole team has it every time, which is the same reason you would build one for filing a bug or drafting a recap.
The last move is to stop running it at all. An agent is an assistant you configure for a recurring job and then equip with skills, and "prep me for my meetings" is the textbook case. You describe the agent in plain language and turn on your meeting-prep skill in its Customize panel, the same skills-and-integrations setup every agent uses.
Then give it a schedule: pick weekday mornings and a time in your timezone, and the agent runs while you sleep. Each morning it preps the day's meetings and leaves a prep doc for each one in your Library, so the work is waiting for you to review rather than assemble before the first call.
Building and equipping that agent is its own short flow, walked through end to end in Create AI agents with skills and integrations. The point here is the shape of the escalation: the skill you wrote in the previous step is exactly what the agent runs on the schedule.
The prep gets sharper over time
One reason to invest the few minutes this takes: the prep compounds. In your first week with a new account it is mostly introductions. A month of meetings later it is the full relationship, what was promised, what slipped, what to raise next, because the skill draws on a record your team keeps adding to. You build the skill and the agent once, and they keep getting better on their own as the team works in Tana.