AI prompts for everyday admin: a one-page recipe format

People who try a chatbot for ordinary life admin — the billing dispute, the school form, the three quotes that need comparing, the message you have been avoiding writing for a week — usually land in the same place. The answer comes back fluent, three times too long, weirdly cheerful, and it needs so much editing that typing it yourself would have been faster.

That is not a model problem. It is a request problem, and it has a fix that fits on one page.

Why everyday prompts fail

Five failure modes account for almost all of it:

1. No role. Without one, the model answers as a generalist assistant, which is the blandest available voice.
2. Missing context the model cannot infer. It does not know the amount in dispute, the date, who you are writing to, or what you have already tried.
3. No constraints. Unbounded, output defaults to long, hedged and polite. Length, tone and things-to-avoid all have to be stated.
4. No output shape. "Help me with this" produces an essay. "Give me a four-sentence email plus a one-line subject" produces something you can send.
5. No check. Nothing asks the model to flag what it assumed or invented — so you find out later, in front of the other party.

The recipe format

Five fields, always in the same order. The value of a fixed order is that you stop composing from a blank box and start filling in a form.

• Role. Who is answering. "You are a consumer-rights adviser who writes short, unemotional complaint letters."
• Context. The facts the model cannot know. Dates, amounts, reference numbers, what has already happened, what outcome you want.
• Constraints. Length, tone, register, and an explicit list of what to avoid. "Under 150 words. No apologies. Do not threaten legal action. Do not invent policy names."
• Output shape. The exact artefact. "Subject line, then the email body, then a one-line note on what to do if there is no reply in ten working days."
• Check. "List anything you assumed or could not verify from what I gave you."

The check field is the one people drop and the one that matters most. It converts a black box into something reviewable, and it is what makes the difference between drafting assistance and a mistake you send under your own name.

Three worked examples

A billing dispute

Role: a billing-dispute adviser who writes short factual letters. Context: the amount, the invoice date and number, what you were told on the phone and when, the resolution you want. Constraints: under 150 words; neutral; no apology; no legal threats; do not cite regulations you have not been given. Output shape: subject line, body, escalation note. Check: list every assumption.

Comparing three quotes

Role: a procurement analyst. Context: paste the three quotes verbatim and state what actually matters to you — total cost, timeline, warranty, whatever it really is. Constraints: no recommendation until after the comparison; flag anything missing from a quote rather than estimating it. Output shape: a table with one row per criterion, then a three-sentence recommendation. Check: list every figure inferred rather than read.

Distilling a long document

Role: a careful reader who surfaces obligations. Context: the document, and what you need to decide. Constraints: quote the source text for every point; do not paraphrase dates, amounts or deadlines. Output shape: clauses, dates, costs and obligations as four separate lists. Check: flag anything ambiguous rather than resolving it.

Note the pattern in the constraint fields. Each one bans a specific way the answer could go wrong for that task. Generic constraints ("be concise") do very little; task-specific bans do most of the work.

Where to stop

A drafting aid is not an adviser. Draft the awkward message, compare the quotes, pull the deadlines out of the contract — then verify anything consequential against the source, and take qualified professional advice where the stakes are medical, legal or financial. The recipe format includes a check field precisely so the boundary stays visible instead of dissolving into fluent prose.

Making it reusable

Write your three or four most common tasks out once in this format and keep them somewhere you can copy from. The saving is not in any single prompt — it is in never composing from a blank box again. Most people find four or five recipes cover the large majority of what they actually ask for.

Related reading

• Stop Typing, Start Asking — full first chapter, free, no email required
• Full contents and what is included
• Turning one long-form recording into twenty publishable assets
• All Avalon Store products