Prompting: 30-Day Growth Guide

Points clés

• Ten minutes a day on real tasks, in one fixed slot, builds prompting skill faster than occasional long sessions with made-up questions.
• Week one teaches you to say what you want and who it is for; week two teaches you to shape what comes back.
• Week three adds steering, checking and privacy, so a good-looking reply never goes out unexamined or carrying someone's private details.
• In week four, build one keeper prompt for a real weekly job, test it on three different inputs and save it with a name.
• Track turns-to-usable every day, re-run your day-one prompts on day twenty-eight, and rescue a slipped week by shrinking it rather than restarting.

À l'intérieur de ce bit

1. Before day one: a slot, a log, a baseline

   This programme runs for four weeks, with one theme a week and one small action a day, each taking about ten minutes. The rule that makes it work is that every action uses a real task from your life, never a made-up question.

2. Week one: say what you want and for whom

   A prompt is simply the message you type to the tool. The tool knows only what is in that message and the chat so far: not your reader, not your deadline, not the facts of your situation.

3. Week two: shape what comes back

   Once the tool knows what you want, week two controls the form of the answer. Day eight names a format: a table with three columns, a numbered list of five, or two short paragraphs.

4. Week three: steer, check and protect

   Week three is about what happens after the reply arrives. Steering means improving a reply with a follow-up message, such as 'keep the first line, make it warmer, add the Friday deadline', instead of starting again.

5. Week four: build one prompt worth keeping

   The last week turns practice into something you will use every week afterwards: a keeper prompt. This is a saved prompt for a recurring job, written with everything from weeks one to three and with blanks, in square brackets, for the parts that change.

6. Reading your log and recovering lost days

   Your log answers the question every learner asks: am I actually getting better? Look at three things at the end of each week.