Outcome
By the end of this lesson you'll have a one-page personal playbook: the three tasks in your role most worth delegating, a tested prompt template for each, and a short list of things you've deliberately decided to keep for yourself. It'll take about an hour to build, and it replaces re-inventing prompts under deadline pressure.
Concept
The earlier lessons gave you prompts for specific jobs. Most people stop there and end up with a pile of chats they can't find. The step that turns a pile into a system is choosing deliberately.
Two ideas do the work.
First, not every task deserves automation. A useful screen is what we'll call the Worth-It Test. A task is worth delegating when it is:
- Recurring — you do it at least weekly, or it comes up often.
- Patterned — instances look alike; only the details change.
- Checkable — you can tell quickly whether the output is right.
- Low-regret — a mistake is small and caught before it matters.
A task that fails the last two, such as anything with big stakes or no easy way to verify, stays human, however tempting it is.
Second, a template beats a prompt that happened to work. A one-off prompt
mentions a specific vendor, a specific thread, a specific date. A template keeps
the shape of the request and swaps the specifics for [PLACEHOLDERS]. Once a
prompt has worked for you twice with only the input changing, it's ready to be a
template.
Build
Part 1: Audit your week. Look back over the last five working days (calendar, sent mail, and to-do list help). List every task that took more than ten minutes. For each, write a rough duration and how often it recurs. Don't filter yet.
Part 2: Run the Worth-It Test. Give each task a yes or no on the four questions above. Count the yeses. Anything with four is a strong candidate. Pick your top three, and favor the ones that cost you the most time.
Part 3: Turn your best prompt into a template. Take the prompt that worked best for each of your three tasks and rewrite it using this skeleton:
ROLE / TASK: You are helping me [TASK IN ONE LINE].
CONTEXT: [WHO IT'S FOR, WHAT THEY CARE ABOUT]
INPUT:
[PASTE MATERIAL HERE]
OUTPUT FORMAT: [STRUCTURE, LENGTH, TONE]
RULES:
- Use only the information provided
- If something is missing, write [MISSING: ...] instead of guessing
- Flag anything you're unsure about at the end
This is the same skeleton behind every prompt in this track, so it should feel familiar. Use it as a starting point and adjust per task.
Part 4: Test each template. Run each template on two different real inputs. If the output needs the same fix both times, put that fix into the template. If it needs a different fix each time, the task may be too variable to automate, so mark it as manual.
Part 5: Build the playbook page.
Here are my three tested prompt templates and the tasks they belong to:
[PASTE TEMPLATES]
Organize these into a one-page playbook with, for each:
- Task name
- When I use it (trigger)
- What I paste in
- What I check before using the output
- Where the template lives
Add a final section called "Not delegating" with this list and my reasons:
[LIST + REASONS]
Save the result somewhere you'll find in under a minute: a single note, a document, or a folder of saved prompts. If finding it is slow, you'll quietly go back to starting from scratch.
Part 6: Write the "Not delegating" list. This is part of the system, not an afterthought. Write down what you're keeping and why. For example: "Feedback to my team: needs my relationship and context." "Anything involving a contract: needs a professional." This list keeps you from sliding into handing off things that shouldn't be handed off.
A worked example
This playbook entry is invented to show the format; yours will reflect your own work.
Task (illustrative): Weekly customer-update email Trigger: Friday at 2 p.m. Paste in: This week's notes (bullet points), last week's email Check before sending: Every number matches my notes; no promises I haven't approved; tone fits the customer Template lives in: "Playbook" note, section 1
Not delegating (illustrative): Pricing negotiations — needs my judgment and approval.
One entry, six lines, and it's actionable.
Run
Try it now (5 minutes). Open a note and write down every task that took you more than ten minutes yesterday. Next to each, mark R, P, C, L for recurring, patterned, checkable, and low-regret. Circle the one with the most letters. That's your first template.
Guardrails: what a human must verify.
- Every output, every time, at the start. A template makes a result repeatable, not correct. Keep your "check before using" step on each entry.
- Numbers, names, and quotes in anything generated from your templates.
- Privacy. Templates make it easy to paste things quickly. Keep your rule in the playbook: no confidential or customer data in tools your organization hasn't approved, and redact when in doubt.
- Drift. Roles and tools change. Treat the playbook as living; a template that no longer fits is worse than none.
- Check your workplace's AI policy before you build a playbook around work content.
Make it a habit. Before writing a prompt from scratch, open the playbook. If a template is close but off, update it. Once a month, spend ten minutes retiring stale templates and adding one new candidate from your latest audit.
Checkpoint.
- I audited a full week of tasks.
- I picked my top three using the Worth-It Test.
- Each of the three has a template tested on two real inputs.
- My playbook says what to check before using each output.
- I wrote a "Not delegating" list with reasons.
That completes the free Work track. If you want to go from reusable prompts to workflows that run on their own, continue with From prompts to workflows.