13 Tips to become a Fellow.app Expert

Tips, tricks, and hidden features to help you and your team get the most out of Fellow because great meetings are just the start.

Mikaela Friedrich

Published in

Fellow.app

8 min readDec 22, 2022

Since starting at Fellow in 2019, I’ve used the tool a lot for meetings, one-on-ones, and general project management.

As part of my role, I also write a lot of help content — which means that I know a lot about the features and best practices that you might not have discovered yet. Here are my top tips to get the most of Fellow (and become an expert user):

1. Download the Desktop App

Available for both macOS and Windows, Fellow’s desktop app ensures that Fellow (and your meeting notes/action items) are always on hand.

I often get carried away in a task and lose track of time, so I find the desktop notifications so valuable to ensure that I don’t miss a meeting. I also use companion mode to open my notes and the video call link right from the notification. Which means that instead of spending the last minute before a meeting frantically searching for the relevant things, I can take that minute to reset or even get a glass of water.

The desktop app also comes with a super cool tray app — just icing on the cake.

2. Customize your Stream Settings

Stream settings are an unknown for a lot of users, but they are a hidden gem! Located under the three dot drop menu at the top of every stream, stream settings is the place to go to really get the most out of each stream.

Here you can:

Communicate the purpose of the meeting or shared stream
Set up automations including the option to cancel meetings if there is no agenda, sending out pre-meeting reminders, and post meeting recaps.
Carry forward incomplete action items and talking points
Connect integrations so that action items created get synced with a tool like Asana, ClickUp, or Linear.

There are a few more things that you can do here, we’ll go into more details in some of the other tips.

3. Enable the action items, objectives, and feedback tabs

At the top of each stream, you’ll see a “Notes” tab, but this doesn’t have to be the only one. In Stream Settings, you’ll also have the option to enable the action items, feedback, and objectives tab.

Personally, I love enabling the action items tab for recurring meetings because it makes it easy to follow-up on tasks that were previously discussed.

4. Organize your home panel

People are different and it’s no surprise that they think and work differently. Fellow gives users the option to customize the tool in a way that works best for you. One of these ways is by organize your home panel.

You can create new groups such as “Project X”. Rearrange the groups by dragging and dropping to put the items in an order that makes sense to you.

This means that I can have a group for a project that I’m currently working on which includes a shared stream, project kickoff, and the status updates meetings.

Oh and did I mention, that you can also include tags in these groups? 🤯

5. Prioritize tasks with tags

Action items are a great way to stay organized and on top of all the tasks that need to be completed. But sometimes, it’s also good to have some additional context to know what to prioritize.

Add priority designations to your action items with tags such as #low-priority, #medium-priority, and #high-priority. You’ll know what needs to be done first with just a quick glance at your action items page.

6. Create custom templates or use one of our 500

One hurdle of creating a meeting agenda can be knowing how to start and what to add. If you are in need of some inspiration, Fellow has got you covered with over 500 templates in our library. Browse these templates, click apply to start using it right away. Or customize the existing template to better fit your needs.

There is also the option to build a meeting template from scratch. If you have a system that works for you, build it in Fellow, save it, and apply it to future instances of the meeting.

For recurring meetings, I always find myself tweaking the agenda based on how the previous meeting went. Maybe this is adding a new section, removing another, etc. Whatever it is, feel free to edit the template as you go and save the changes.

7. If you use Google Meet, the browser extension is a must

With over 30,000 users, the Fellow browser extension helps a lot of users seamlessly view their meeting notes during Google Meet calls. Here’s how it works — when it comes to joining a video conferencing call, click on the link. Join your meeting, then click on the Fellow icon at the bottom. That’s it.

*Available for both Chrome and Firefox

8. Presence Indicators

This one is small but can be incredibly impactful. At the top of each note, you’ll see the icons of the people who have access to the note.

This is great in a few scenarios:

As you are preparing for the meeting, you can see who else has viewed the note in advance and who is winging it (i.e. see the note for the first time as the meeting starts)
Taking attendance at the start of the meeting — you’re only there if you’re in the Fellow note!
During the meeting, you can see who is following along and contributing notes.

BONUS — you can see who added each talking point by clicking the three dots at the end of the line and viewing “Added by X”.

9. Sections

Oftentimes, meeting agendas require contributions from people other than the meeting organizer. Whether these are daily standups, project check-ins, or weekly syncs, it’s important for meeting attendees to contribute to the agenda.

Sections makes this easy. In Fellow, configure a section. This means two things:

It’s easy for meeting attendees to know what they need to add and where
This can be set up with automatic reminders sent out to participants who have yet to fill out their section. Getting a reminder 15 minutes before the meeting starts on Slack or email helps ensure that everyone remembers to contribute.

10. Use comments & reactions for async meetings

At Fellow, we love to embrace the concept of async meetings as a way to efficiently communicate updates/get information without having to meeting person. This is also great because as a fully remote company we also have employees across different time zones, which can be challenging for scheduling synchronous meetings.

During these meetings, add comments and reactions to get input and discussion — without the need to actually talk.

11. Bookmark spreadsheets and important files

In my role, I use a lot of Google Sheets. I mean, A LOT of Google Sheets. By adding these sheets as bookmarks to a meeting stream, I can quickly share the spreadsheet contents with all the meeting attendees. Then as the meeting progresses, I can easily walk them through any data that I want to share. Easy Peasy.

12. Schedule meetings straight from Fellow

Have you ever been in a meeting, and decided that that meeting needed a follow-up? Or as you review your action items, you decide that you need another project follow-up meeting?

Whatever the situation, the key here is that you can schedule meetings without having to leave Fellow! Click on the plus button at the top of the calendar. This will open a modal where you can see other participants calendars, and find a time that works well for everyone. Plus, you can include a video conferencing link.

13. Clean up your home panel

As a long time Fellow user, I have a lot of streams and meetings stored in Fellow. Every so often, I like to go through and clean things up by archiving streams that are no longer relevant to me. This could be 1-on-1 streams with someone I no longer work with, or a shared project stream that has ended, or just even a personal brainstorming stream that I no longer use. To do this, visit the home panel and click on the three dots next to the item that you want to remove and select Remove from home panel. This item will still be accessible via search.