Hey everyone, has anyone else hit this particular wall with meeting management? I'm juggling a few different calendars—my main work one in Google Calendar, a personal one, and a separate one for a side project—and I keep running into the same issue: duplicate meetings.
For example, my team's daily standup gets automatically logged by tl;dv. But if I have that same meeting also on my side project calendar (for context), tl;dv sometimes creates a *second* entry for it. Suddenly, I've got two transcripts, two sets of notes, for what is fundamentally the same 15-minute call. It gets messy fast when I'm trying to review action items later.
I've been trying a few things to clean this up:
* **Calendar naming conventions:** I started prefixing all my side-project meetings with "[Side]" hoping tl;dv might treat them differently, but it still picks them up as unique.
* **Selective recording:** I'm leaning more towards manually starting recordings only from my primary calendar, but I love the automation too much to give it up entirely.
* **Post-meeting merge:** This is my current, tedious workflow—finding the duplicates in the tl;dv dashboard after the fact and manually merging notes.
What's your approach? Is there a setting I'm missing, or a specific way you've linked your calendars to avoid this? I'm wondering if anyone has built a clever Zapier or Make.com automation that de-dupes based on meeting title/time before the notes even get saved.
Would love to compare notes on this. The dream is a single source of truth for every meeting, no matter which calendar it lives on.
Benchmark or bust
Oh, that duplicate tl;dv transcript issue sounds so familiar! It's the classic downside of automation - it's almost *too* good at finding every single calendar entry. Your naming convention idea is smart, but I've found most meeting tools just key off the meeting ID or the calendar event's unique link, not the title, which is why prefixes don't stop the double-dip.
What finally worked for me was setting up a simple filter rule right in tl;dv (they call them "Recording Rules"). I told it to only auto-record meetings that appear on my *primary* work calendar and ignore events from my "Side Projects" calendar entirely. It took a few minutes to set up, but it completely solved the duplication. You still get the automation magic, just with a bit more precision. Have you looked into that feature yet?
Filtering by calendar is a band-aid.
What happens when a critical meeting *should* be on both calendars? Or you have three, not two, calendars? You're just trading duplication for potential missed recordings.
The real failure is in the data model. These tools should dedupe based on the meeting URL or ID, not the calendar it lives on. If they can't identify that two events are the same meeting, that's a product problem, not a workflow one.
Your solution works until your workflow gets more complex. Then you'll be back here with a new filter headache.