Short notes on the habits behind useful results. Read one, try the prompt, and bring the idea into your next piece of work.
01 / BETTER INPUTS
The brief comes before the tool.
A vague request makes the AI choose the audience, purpose, format, and standard of quality for you. Sometimes those guesses are useful. Often they are simply different from what you had in mind.
Before asking for a draft, write five short lines: who it is for, what they should understand or do, which facts to use, what the output should look like, and what to avoid. You do not need a long prompt. You need a brief that makes the important decisions visible.
For a social post, “write about AI” leaves almost everything open. “Write a 120-word Instagram caption for first-time business owners, explaining one way to turn meeting notes into next actions; use the example below and end with a question” gives the draft a purpose. Add your actual example before sending it.
When the output misses the mark, fix the missing decision in the brief before adding more adjectives. Keep the successful brief so the next task starts from something you have already checked.
TRY THE IDEA
Help me sharpen this brief before writing anything.
Audience: [who this is for]
Purpose: [what they should understand or do]
Inputs: [facts, examples, and source material]
Output: [format and length]
Limits: [what to avoid or not assume]
Point out the two most important missing details. Ask only questions that would materially change the result.
A good prompt helps once. A useful workflow tells you what to prepare, what to ask, what to check, and what to keep for the next run. It makes the task easier to repeat without pretending every result is ready to publish.
Take a weekly content task. First collect the week’s real observations and customer questions. Then choose one useful idea. Draft it for a specific audience. Review the facts and tone. Finally, save the approved version and note what you changed. Each step has a clear output.
Keep the steps separate when the decisions matter. Asking for research, strategy, a script, a caption, and a sales promise in one turn makes it harder to notice where an unsupported assumption entered. A short sequence gives you places to intervene.
After the second or third run, look for repeated edits. If you always remove invented statistics or shorten the introduction, add those checks to the workflow. The system improves because you learn from the work, not because the prompt gets longer.
TRY THE IDEA
Turn this recurring task into a small, repeatable workflow: [task].
Inputs I normally have: [inputs].
Final output: [deliverable].
Create no more than five steps. For each step, specify the input, action, output, and a check before moving on. Mark any decision that needs my review. Do not add integrations or assume access to accounts.
A fluent answer can hide a weak assumption. Before using an AI-generated claim, make it possible to check where it came from and whether the source actually supports it.
Separate three things: facts from supplied sources, interpretations of those facts, and suggestions. They can all be useful, but they deserve different kinds of confidence. A recommendation should not quietly become a claim that something already happened.
For research, ask for a claim-by-claim source map. Open the links yourself. Check the source date, the original context, and whether the quoted information says what the summary suggests. If the tool cannot access a source, treat the reference as unverified until you can inspect it.
For work based on your own documents, require the answer to use only the supplied material and identify gaps. If the documents do not state a budget or deadline, “not provided” is more useful than a polished guess.
TRY THE IDEA
Review this draft against only the source material below.
Draft: [paste draft]
Sources: [paste source text with labels]
Create a table with claim, supporting source passage, and status: supported, partly supported, or not supported. Separate factual errors from suggestions. Flag missing evidence; do not invent citations or fill gaps with outside knowledge.