The people who get good at this are almost never the people who read the most about it. They are the ones who tried one small thing on real work, most days, for a few months.
Why daily beats intensive
A weekend course gives you a notebook of ideas and no habits. Ten minutes a weekday gives you roughly forty small experiments a quarter, each one attached to a task you actually had to do. The second group ends up with workflows; the first ends up with notes.
What a daily tip should look like
A tip is only useful if it can be tried before lunch. That means:
- One task, named plainly — not "improve your writing" but "turn today's meeting notes into actions".
- A prompt you can copy, with brackets where your material goes.
- A way to tell whether it worked, in one sentence.
Anything longer is an article, not a habit.
Five that earn their place
- Paste, don't summarise. Give the model the raw material rather than your description of it.
- Ask for the questions first. "Ask me five questions before answering" fixes most vague outputs.
- Show one example. One piece of your own good work beats a paragraph of tone instructions.
- Name the audience. The same facts, written for two audiences, are two documents.
- Demand the gaps. "List anything you had to assume" turns invisible guessing into a checklist.
Keep it small on purpose
Twenty minutes a week is enough to stay current: one roundup of what actually shipped, one look at anything affecting the tools you rely on, and one experiment on real work. Watching how other people built their workflows teaches more than reading launch announcements, because you can see where the effort went.
Try this today
Put a recurring ten-minute slot in your calendar with exactly one job: try one new thing on work you already have to do.