Building reusable prompts

If you're doing the same thing every week, stop rewriting it. A well-crafted prompt is a tool: keep it.

The fill-in-the-blank template

Write the full prompt once, with its levers, and replace what varies with visible markers:

"You are an executive assistant. Here is the raw minutes of a meeting: [PASTE HERE]. Produce: a five-line summary paragraph, the list of decisions, the list of actions with their owner and deadline. Do not invent any name or date absent from the text."

Keep it in a text file or a note. You'll never rewrite that prompt again.

Permanent instructions

Most services offer custom instructions, applied to all your conversations: your job, your tone, your habits. "Always reply in French, get to the point, no intro, use 'tu' with me."

That's thirty seconds of setup that saves you a sentence in every message, forever.

Dedicated assistants

One step up: create a preconfigured assistant, with its instructions and sometimes its reference documents. Useful when several people need to get the same output format.

The real gain

It's not in speed but in consistency. A template produces the same structure every time, making results comparable from one week to the next. That's what improvisation never delivers.