The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

It may require some fine-tun­ing and rea­son­ing to get there, and once you’ve done it, you prob­a­bly want to be able to repeat it when­ev­er you have the same need. How­ev­er, it is cum­ber­some to write out the entire prompt let­ter by let­ter the next time and exhaust­ing to have to remem­ber exact­ly how you wrote it to get such a good result.

That’s why it’s a good idea to save your favorite prompts so you can use them again later.

Do this

If you use Microsoft Copi­lot, save the prompt in the ​“Copi­lot Prompt Gallery” fea­ture. Here’s how:

1. When you are par­tic­u­lar­ly pleased with a prompt, hov­er your mouse over the text and click the ​“Save prompt” but­ton that appears.
   
2. You can then find the prompt under ​“Your prompts” in the ​“Copi­lot Prompt Gallery” along with some stan­dard prompts that Microsoft has added.

If you use Chat­G­PT, there are at least three options:

1. Save the prompt in a doc­u­ment that you can eas­i­ly access. It can be a sim­ple text file in the Notes or Text Edi­tor app, a page in OneNote or Notion, or a Word document.
   
2. Get an exten­sion for your Chrome brows­er specif­i­cal­ly for sav­ing prompts. You can find plen­ty of these by search­ing for ​“save prompt” in the Chrome Web Store.
   
3. Use a text expan­sion app like Tex­tEx­pander. In this app, you can add each prompt as a sep­a­rate text block and assign an abbre­vi­a­tion. When you type the abbre­vi­a­tion, it expands to the entire prompt. This is what I do, and it works incred­i­bly well.

The most minor effort

By sav­ing your best prompts, you grad­u­al­ly build a library of valu­able prompts for your­self. This means you won’t have to rein­vent the wheel every time you have a need you’ve had before. Instead, you will get the help you need from AI faster and with lit­tle effort.

How do you do it?

Do you save your prompts dif­fer­ent­ly? How? Please write to me and let me know! 

(Keen for more ways to use AI? Watch my video: Ask the AI what you missed in the meet­ing)