Let's 🗡️ dissect some prompts
Learn what OK, better and best prompts look like
Happy Monday 👋 I’m back with part 2 of our 3-part series on AI chatbot prompting.
This week, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty.
We’re 🗡️ dissecting three prompts for an example task to look at what separates the good from the great.
In a nutshell, it’s all in the detail.
Detail on who you are, the role you want the chatbot to play or expertise it should have, the task at hand (including all the context and detail you have time to feed in), your intent, and any guidelines on format — aka all elements of the COIF framework we covered in the last edition.
The more detail you include, the better your output will be.
Let’s get into it ⚡️
Example: planning an offsite
Imagine that you’re planning a leadership team offsite.
Normally that means a lot of admin. Endless planning and organization, lists, spreadsheets, coordinating with vendors and folks internally… it can be a huge time sink.
Use AI and a skilfully-crafted prompt to create your comprehensive project plan.
Here are three different prompt examples. Watch me demo these to see the stark difference in outputs.
OK prompt
(I’m being optimistic.. this is total garbage!)
“Help me plan a leadership team offsite.”
Better prompt
A little more context now:
“I'm an executive assistant working in insurance. Help me plan an offsite for a leadership team. It's for 12 execs spanning two days.”
Best prompt
OK, let’s go all out:
“Imagine you're an extremely experienced event planner. You need to plan a two-day leadership team offsite for 12 execs from a global insurance company in three months' time. It will be hosted abroad in Barcelona. The purpose of the event is three-fold: discuss strategy for next year, create alignment, build camaraderie. Provide a comprehensive project plan including all tasks that need to be done for the offsite agenda, materials, teambuilding activities, venue, accommodation, meals, transport, communications, post-event feedback and anything else you can think of. Present the plan in a sheet format, including suggested deadlines and responsible party for each task. Ask me questions to clarify any details you need in order to provide a comprehensive project plan.”
☝️ Pro tip: note that last line will trigger your AI chatbot to ask you a series of questions to fill in any and all context you’ve missed. This is a fabulous hack to get radically improved outputs.
Final idea for you: build a prompts bank
That “Best” prompt may take you 5-10 minutes to write out, especially if you’re new to prompt crafting (promise it gets quicker the more you do it!).
So capture it somewhere — in a sheet, a note on your desktop, maybe even in a shared doc with your team. Start to build up a repository for your carefully crafted prompts to save yourself time next time you have a similar task to do.
ICYMI we have a free prompts bank designed especially for assistants to get you started 👉 The Carve High-Impact Prompting Guide and Prompts Bank
Swipe what you like, adapt by ad libbing where we’ve included placeholders, and watch your outputs blossom.
See you next week for prompting pro tips and a guide to megaprompting.
Fi
p.s. in case you’re curious about the results of last week’s poll, ~60% of you disagreed or strongly disagreed to the statement “I’m confident I know how to write strong prompts to optimize outputs from AI chatbots.” And just 8% of you strongly agreed. Safe to say the vast majority of us have more to learn 🌱
p.p.s. just for fun, check out this ChatGPT chicken recipe I shared today on LinkedIn 😆