Build a prompt once. Use it every week.
This is Burst 02. If this is your first time here, start with Burst 01: AI Isn't Google to learn the basics of working with AI.
Think about STAR. When someone asks you to talk through a situation, you do not just say "there was a problem and I fixed it." You break it down. What was the situation? What was the task? What action did you take? What was the result?
You use that structure because without it, the important detail gets lost. The person listening fills in the gaps with their own assumptions and misses what actually happened.
AI works the same way. When most people ask it for help, they give it something like this:
"Write me a weekly email to my team about business."
No structure. No context. No detail. The AI fills in the gaps itself, and you get something generic every time.
The fix is something you already do. Give AI the same structure you use when you walk someone through a STAR. Break it down so nothing gets lost. That is a structured prompt.
A structured prompt is not complicated. It has three parts. Once you understand these, you can build one for any recurring task.
Tell the AI who the output is for and why it exists. This is the most important part because it shapes every decision the AI makes. Without it, the AI writes for a generic audience in a generic tone.
"Write a weekly team email."
"This email goes to my store team every Monday. It gives them a quick overview of last week's business and what we are focusing on this week. The tone is direct but encouraging."
List the sections you want in the output. This stops the AI from guessing what to include or leaving things out. Think of it as the skeleton. The AI fills in the detail, but you decide the structure.
"Include these sections: Business overview. What went well. What needs attention. Focus for next week. People updates."
These are the guardrails. Formatting preferences, terminology, things to avoid. Rules are what stop the AI from sounding generic or getting the small things wrong. They are also where you teach the AI how your business talks.
"Use British English. Keep it to flowing paragraphs, not bullet points. lululemon is always lowercase. Do not use emojis."
Purpose tells the AI why. Sections tell it what. Rules tell it how. That is all a structured prompt is.
Here is a finished structured prompt for a weekly leadership email. Notice how each building block is doing its job.
That last line is important. It tells the AI to ask you for more information rather than guessing. The prompt works in both directions: you give it notes, and it pushes back when something is missing.
Open a new conversation. Paste the prompt at the top. Share your raw notes. They do not need to be tidy. The prompt already knows the structure, so the AI organises your notes into the right format.
Miss a section? The AI asks you about it. Over time you will add rules, tweak sections, and refine the tone. The prompt grows with you.
Pick a task you do every week and build your own structured prompt using the three building blocks.
Good candidates: a weekly email, a shift handover, a team meeting agenda, a recap for your manager, or any task where the structure stays the same but the details change.
Now put all three blocks together in this order: purpose, then sections, then rules. Paste the whole thing at the start of a new AI conversation, share your notes, and see what happens.
The first version will not be perfect. That is normal. Use it a few times, notice what the AI gets wrong, and add a rule to fix it. Every correction makes the prompt sharper.
The prompts most people write are one-off instructions that disappear the moment the conversation ends. A structured prompt is different. It captures how you think about a task so the AI can do the organising for you, every single time.
A single sentence. The AI guesses the rest.
Purpose, sections, rules. You control the output.
It asks you questions. It evolves as you use it.
Today you learned the middle one. The more you use it, the more it will naturally evolve toward the right. You will add rules when things go wrong, refine sections when priorities shift, and build something that genuinely saves you time.
Facilitated by
Loy Lee