Most advice about meeting preparation is about the meeting. The agenda, the deck, the outcome you want, the three points you must land. All fine, and none of it is the part you get wrong.
The part you get wrong is the person. You sit down across from someone you have met twice, you cannot remember what you talked about, and you spend the first four minutes doing a careful dance around your own ignorance. They can tell. People can always tell.
You know this person, but what did you talk about last time? That is a two minute problem with a two minute fix, and it is worth more than another hour on the deck.
The four questions
Who are they to you? How you met, who introduced you, and what the relationship actually is: a client, a former colleague, someone a friend vouched for. This sets the register for everything else, and it is the fact that decays fastest.
What happened last time?One line. What you discussed, and how it ended. Not the minutes, the gist. "We talked about their hiring problem and left it that we would pick it up after their board meeting."
What did you say you would do? The single most valuable question on the list. Walking in having quietly failed to do the thing you promised is the fastest way to look like someone who does not follow through, and it is nearly always an oversight rather than a decision. If you find one here and it is still undone, say so first, before they have to ask.
What has changed since? New job, new title, company in the news, funding, a product launch, a move. This is the one that turns a competent meeting into a warm one, because it is proof you thought about them when they were not in the room.
Four answers, three of them one line each. That is the whole prep, and it is about the person, not the agenda.
When to do it
Immediately before, not the night before. Prep done twelve hours early has to be remembered twice, and the second time is the one that fails. The walk from the car park, the wait in reception, the ninety seconds before a video call connects: that is the window.
Read the four answers. Pick one thing to open with. Decide whether you owe them anything and, if you do, how you are going to say so. Then put the phone away, because walking in mid-scroll undoes the whole effect.
If you cannot get the four answers in two minutes, the problem is not your preparation. It is where your notes live. The fix is upstream, in what you wrote down and where it went.
Use one thing, not four
There is a failure mode at the other end of this, and it is worse than being unprepared. Someone who has clearly read a file on you, and deploys it, is unnerving. Naming their daughter, their marathon and their house move in the first two minutes is not warmth. It is a performance of warmth, and it makes people careful with you.
So use one. Ask about the hiring, or the launch, or how the move went. If they take it, good, that is the conversation. If they give it one line and change the subject, let it go. The rest of what you know is not conversational material. It is context, and its job is to stop you saying something stupid, not to be displayed.
When the honest answer is nothing
Sometimes you will get to the four questions and have no answers at all. The move then is not to bluff. Be plain: it has been a while, where did we get to? People are almost always generous about this, and the version where you pretend and get caught out is far more expensive.
Then fix it on the way out. Sixty seconds, four lines, attached to the person, so the next one is different.
Walk in prepared without doing the prep
By hand, this is a search through old email, a scroll of a message thread and a look at their LinkedIn. That is roughly ten minutes, and it is why nobody does it before a nine o'clock.
It is also what bondaiis for. Open someone's profile and the brief is waiting: who they are, what they do, how you met, what has changed since you last spoke, and what is happening in their world right now. The public parts are researched and kept current. The private parts are the notes you spoke after last time. You walk in prepared without doing the prep, which is the only version of this habit most people will ever sustain.
The routine works without it though. Four questions, two minutes, one thing to open with. Even done badly from memory it puts you ahead of most of the room.
Common questions
How do you prepare for a meeting quickly?
Answer four questions about the person rather than the agenda: who are they to you, what happened last time, what did you say you would do, and what has changed since. Two minutes on the walk in is enough if the answers are somewhere you can reach. Most of the panic in meeting prep is retrieval, not thinking.
What should you do before a meeting with a client you have not seen in a year?
Find the last thing you know about them, check whether it is still true, and check whether you owe them anything. A year is long enough that the useful move is often to say so plainly at the start: name how long it has been, name the thing you remember, and let them update you.
When is the best time to prepare?
Immediately before, not the night before. Prep done twelve hours early has to be remembered twice. The walk from the car park, the lift, the ninety seconds before a video call connects: that is when the information is still hot and you will actually use it.
How do you use what you remember without being weird about it?
Use one thing, not four. Reciting someone's life back at them reads as research, which is unsettling. One specific question, asked early and then dropped if they do not want it, does the whole job.