The back-and-forth

The single most expensive habit in this whole course is treating the first answer as the final answer. It isn’t. It’s a first draft from someone who’s never met your customer, written in seconds, and it’s supposed to be refined, not accepted or binned.

Talk to it like a junior colleague, not a vending machine

If a new starter handed you a first attempt at a customer email and it wasn’t quite right, you wouldn’t scrap it and start again, and you wouldn’t send it as is either. You’d say “shorter”, or “a bit more formal”, or “you’ve missed that we already offered a discount, take that out.” Then you’d read the next version.

AI works exactly the same way, and most people never use it that way. They type one prompt, take whatever comes back, and either send it or give up. Try instead:

• “Shorter. Two paragraphs, not four.”
• “Less formal, we don’t talk like that.”
• “You’ve assumed we do weekend callouts, we don’t, take that out.”
• “Good, now do the same thing for the version I’d text instead of email.”

Each note costs ten seconds and gets you measurably closer. Three rounds of quick feedback nearly always beats one long, careful first prompt.

Let it ask you questions first

For anything with real complexity, a marketing plan, a tender, a policy you’re writing for the first time, add one line before you ask for the actual output: “Before you answer, ask me anything you’d need to know to do this properly.” Answer honestly.

This does two things. It gets you a far better answer, because it’s now built on what you actually told it rather than what it assumed. And it’s often more useful than the eventual answer itself, because the questions it asks tend to surface gaps in your own thinking. An electrician planning a rewire pricing structure who gets asked “do you charge the same for a two-bed as a five-bed, or does it scale?” may realise they’ve never actually settled that themselves.

What this looks like on an ordinary Tuesday

A cafe owner drafting a social post doesn’t need three rounds of back-and-forth on every caption. Save the full conversation for anything that matters, a customer complaint reply, a tender, a policy, and use quick one-line fixes for everything smaller. The habit to build is simple: never treat the first answer as the last word, and never be shy about telling it what’s wrong, exactly as you would a person still learning the job.

Next, we cover the one habit that has nothing to do with getting a better-sounding answer, and everything to do with not sending out a wrong one.