I had a browser folder called “AI stuff”. When I finally went through it last month there were thirty odd links sitting in it. Tools I had signed up for, used twice, and never opened again. Each one had felt, at the time, like the missing piece.
Not one of them changed my week. What did change it is much duller: four or five prompts I reuse until I know exactly what comes back.
New tools feel like progress
Signing up for something has the shape of getting better at your job. There is a tidy demo video, a clean interface, that small lift of feeling slightly ahead. Twenty minutes in and you have done a thing.
Reusing one prompt has none of that. It is you, the same text box, and the same slightly clumsy wording you typed last Tuesday. Nothing to screenshot, nobody to tell. But one of those two habits compounds and the other quietly does not.
What a reused prompt gives you
- You learn its edges. By the fifth go you know where it waffles, so you add one line to fix it rather than rewriting the lot.
- You stop starting from scratch. Half the work of using AI well is describing what you want. Do that once properly and it is done.
- You can hand it over. “Paste your notes into this” is something you can send a colleague or your other half. A tool recommendation is homework. A prompt is a favour.
Boring is the point
The prompts that survive in my week are plain. “Turn these notes into actions with owners and dates.” “Sort this lot into today, this week, and ignore.” No persona, no magic words, no clever formatting. They earn their place by being predictable, and predictable is what lets me trust the answer or spot in two seconds that it is wrong.
How to pick yours
Think of the thing you did three times last week and enjoyed none of them. Writing up notes, chasing people, turning a mess into a list. Write the prompt for that one job, in your own words, and save it where you will actually find it: a pinned note on your phone, a text file, the top of a doc.
Then use it again next week without improving it. Third time, change one line. That is the whole habit. Not a stack of apps, a shortlist of sentences.
Before you sign up for the next one
I ask myself one question now: what would I ask this that I cannot already ask in the window I have open? If I cannot answer that in a sentence, I close the tab. It has saved me a pile of free trials, a few subscriptions, and quite a lot of Sunday evening faff.
If you had to bin every AI tool except one prompt, which one would you keep?