The one-page AI prompt checklist

Most people who give up on AI for ordinary admin give up at the same moment: the cursor is blinking in an empty box, and composing the request starts to feel like more work than the chore itself. So they type something vague, get back something fluent and three times too long, edit it for ten minutes, and conclude the tool does not save time.

The fix is not a better model or a longer prompt. It is a fixed structure, so you stop composing and start filling in a form. This page is that structure — the four parts, the eight-step run-through, and one complete worked prompt. It is an excerpt from a longer book, published here in full because it is the part that is useless unless you actually have it in front of you.

The four parts every prompt needs

Drop any one of these and you can predict which way the answer goes wrong.

Inside part 2, four things do the real work: state the role in plain English, separate your pasted data from your instructions with a simple marker, say the length and format you want, and mark the minimum facts as [Variable] so you cannot forget one.

The eight-step run-through

This is the printable part. Five minutes, start to finish, on desktop or phone.

1. Name the friction point in one sentence, before opening anything.
2. Open any free chat tool — web or mobile, no plugins, no paid tier.
3. Paste a prompt that contains all four parts above.
4. Fill every [bracket] with raw, unedited facts in under 30 seconds.
5. Confirm no password, card number, or full account number is anywhere in the text.
6. Send, then compare what came back against the output you wrote down in step 3.
7. If it is close but off, apply one tweak sentence. Do not start rewriting.
8. Copy the result into its destination, and verify anything consequential against the source.

The 30-second variable rule

This is the step almost everyone gets wrong, so it is worth its own heading. Bracketed variables are not essay prompts. Drop in raw fragments and let the model handle grammar and connective phrasing.

• High effort, wrong. Three minutes spent writing: "I am writing because our family budget has recently tightened due to inflation and we no longer find adequate utility in maintaining this membership tier."
• Low effort, right. Five seconds spent typing: Budget cuts, haven't logged in for 3 months.

The same applies to source material. When a prompt asks you to paste an email thread, a contract excerpt, or a rough inventory, do not tidy it first. Leave the typos, the timestamps, and the broken bullets. Cleaning up your input by hand is the manual work you were trying to delegate.

One complete worked prompt

Here are all four parts assembled, for a chore almost everyone has had. The provider, amount, and dates below are invented for the example — replace them with yours.

1. Situation. An unexplained administrative, late, or service fee appears on a recurring bill, and you want a polite but firm written request to have it waived on the strength of your customer history.

2. Exact prompt — copy from here:

Act as an expert customer service advocate. Write a concise, firm, and polite
message to a service provider requesting a full waiver of an unexpected fee on
my latest bill. Here are the account details:

- Provider Name: [Provider Name]
- Account Holder Name: [Your Full Name]
- Account Reference: [Last 4 digits only]
- Fee Description & Amount: [Fee name and amount]
- Customer Tenure: [How long you have been a customer]
- Reason / Context: [Brief reason, raw fragments are fine]

Requirements:
1. State the purpose of the message in the first sentence.
2. Emphasise my payment history and continuous tenure.
3. Explicitly request a one-time courtesy waiver and an updated balance statement.
4. Keep the entire response under 150 words. Do not use aggressive or emotional
   language. Do not invent policy names or cite regulations I have not given you.
5. End by listing anything you assumed or could not verify from what I supplied.

3. Expected output. A subject line carrying the account reference, then roughly three short paragraphs: what you are asking for and the amount, one sentence of context for why the charge arose, and a direct request for the credit plus an updated statement. Under 150 words, no apology, no threat. If what comes back is a 400-word essay, you left a bracket unfilled — check there first, not at the model.

4. One-line tweak, held in reserve:

"Rewrite this as a direct live-chat script under 75 words, suitable for typing into a real-time support portal."

Whether the provider grants the waiver is their decision. The checklist controls the quality of the request, not the outcome — and that distinction is the honest boundary around all of this. Draft the awkward message, compare the quotes, pull the deadlines out of the contract; then verify anything that matters against the source, and take qualified professional advice where the stakes are medical, legal, or financial.

Make it reusable

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

Related free reading

• Why everyday AI prompts fail — the five failure modes
• Turning one long recording into twenty publishable assets
• The $149 device that costs $653 — two prompts for auditing recurring charges
• All Avalon Store products