12.2 Prompting for Office work

What you'll be able to do

Get a usable first draft instead of a vague one. You will ask in four parts and point at the right source. You will improve the draft instead of starting again, and know the moment to stop prompting and write.

Before you start

The previous lesson's map. Everything here happens in the first group: Copilot working on sources you supply.

The work

1. Same either way: build every ask from four parts. The goal is what you want. The context is who it is for and why. The source is the material to work from. The format is the shape the answer should take. "Summarise this" is one part out of four. Now the full version. "Summarise this report (source) for the finance committee (context) as five risk bullets, one line each (format), so they can decide on the renewal (goal)." Four parts out of four, and the draft arrives usable. Vague in, vague out is the whole economics of prompting.
2. Same either way: name the source, which is the part office prompts most often leave out. Refer to the specific file or thread in the ask. Copilot's windows let you attach or name a document, and in Outlook the thread you are standing in is the context. "Draft a status mail from the project notes", with the notes named, beats any number of adjectives. Naming no source means the model supplies its own, which is the invention problem from the previous lesson, walked into by omission.
3. Same either way: improve the draft rather than starting again. The second prompt is an instruction to edit: "shorter", "more formal", "as a table", "keep point two and cut the rest". Each of those keeps what the last round got right. Starting over rolls the dice again and loses it. Two or three focused improvements is the normal path from draft to usable.
4. Same either way: keep a personal library of prompts for the asks that recur. The weekly status summary. Pulling actions out of meeting notes. The polite chase. Written once with all four parts and kept in OneNote, which the capture lesson made the home for exactly this, each becomes a paste-and-point routine. Prompting then becomes something you own rather than something you compose fresh each time.
5. Same either way: know the stopping rule, which is what separates people who use the tool from people who depend on it. Sometimes two rounds of improvement have not got you there. Sometimes the piece needs judgement, or a relationship, or has something at stake: the sensitive mail, the feedback on someone's performance, the apology. Then stop and write it yourself, perhaps from the draft's skeleton. And for text that matters, the draft is raw material and never the final version. Your name goes on it, so your judgement finishes it. The tool speeds up the first 80 per cent, and the last 20 per cent was always yours.

Try it

Write the four-part version of your most common ask. Run it, or check it against the four parts on paper if you have no licence. Then write two improvement instructions. Save all three into a prompt-library page in OneNote. Then name one task from your week that fails the stopping rule and should never be handed to a draft.

Check yourself