Pin down the task

What this technique does

Boil down how to write a specific prompt to one line and you get verb + object + scope. “Sort this out” contains summarising, sorting, extracting and rewriting all at once, so the AI has to pick one of them. It usually picks summarising, and if what you needed was a list of to-dos, you start over.

Choose the verb (pull out, rewrite, compare), narrow the object (only the decisions, not the whole thing), and set the scope (at most seven, up to last quarter) and there is nothing left for the AI to choose. Every vague word you delete is time you do not spend fixing the result.

Good example / bad example

Bad

sort out this material for me

Good

From the customer enquiries below, pull out only the complaints that come up repeatedly. Group similar enquiries into one, and list at most seven, most frequent first. Leave out compliments and simple delivery-tracking questions.

The first hands back a prose summary of the enquiries, and you still have to read through and count what comes up often. The second has the grouping rule, the number and the exclusions settled, so the result goes straight into the meeting deck.

How to write it

• From the {material} below, pull out only {object}.
• Compare {A} with {B} and list only the {number} differences.
• Cover only up to {scope}, not the whole thing.

Watch out

Stack several verbs into one request (summarise it, translate it, put it in a table) and the later instructions fade first. One at a time, then ask for the next, is more accurate.

“In detail” and “properly” are not specific. Swap them for countable things: length, number, criteria.

Unfamiliar terms? See Aha AI: prompt