Press record 🔴
The 10-minute workflow I use to capture and share family history
I’m desperate to collect stories. Especially family stories.
I collect them by email. Obituaries. Group email threads on a grandparent’s birthday. I find them in the Phillips Academy archive. Letters, speeches, travel itineraries. I collect them in conversations — in person, by Zoom, by phone. I am greedy for them because they help me know people I never knew as an adult.
And I know how fast the stories can disappear.
A few months ago, I got my cousin Frank talking. Two hours later, I had almost 90 minutes of recordings. When I got home, I spent ten minutes turning the audio into a transcript and shared it with my Mom and my sisters.
The stories were new for them, too.
If you don’t know what I mean by “turning audio into a transcript,” start with My #1 life hack. The short version: I press record, talk, then paste the transcript into Claude with one simple instruction. It works with voice memos, Zoom recordings, and phone calls. (Here’s how to record a phone call on an iPhone, if you’re curious.)
I use this all the time with clients, too. Someone will say something brilliant — the exact sentence that should open their next faculty meeting — and I’ll ask, “Can I record this?”
A few of you have written to ask: OK, I’ve got the recording. Now what?
Here’s the whole thing:
Open Claude or ChatGPT or whatever you use. Start a new chat. Paste in this prompt, then paste in your transcript:
Edit this voice transcript by removing filler words and adding headers. Do not summarize.
That’s it.
If you want to skip the prompt step every time, create a project (in Claude) or a custom GPT (in ChatGPT) and paste that same instruction into the project settings. Then every transcript you drop in gets cleaned up automatically.
The hack is useful. I know that.
But the reason I keep using it isn’t efficiency.
AI doesn’t know my family’s stories. But it can help me capture them — and share them. My sisters couldn’t be there when Frank started talking. But ten minutes after I got home, they had the transcript on their phones.
That’s what I love about AI. Not that it replaces anything human. That it can make a human moment last.
Two hours with Frank gave my family something we didn’t have the day before.
Whose stories are you collecting? Whose stories do you want to capture before they disappear?
Happy storytelling.
🕊️
SAM
