Productivity
Intermediate
15 min
Building your personal prompt library
The problem
Three weeks ago you got an excellent output. You need it again. You scroll, search a half-remembered phrase, fail, and rewrite the prompt from memory — worse than the original, because you have forgotten the two refinements that made it work.
The workflow
1Collect what works
2Write the six fields
3Add placeholders
4Add verify steps
5Organise by task
6Version it
7Share
★Review quarterly
What you need
Prompt that worked: You are summarising weekend field-sales notes for the sales director of Shree Distributors, a Nashik FMCG distributor with six field executives. Notes are informal WhatsApp messages in mixed English and Hinglish.
The tool
One Google Doc or Notion page
The prompt
Subscribers. The full prompt is part of the SMEMinds AI Playbook. See plans.
What comes back
NAME — Weekly field-sales notes → director summary WHEN TO USE — Every Monday for the weekend WhatsApp notes. Do not use for the monthly review, which needs trend analysis rather than a summary.
Verify before you use it
Human review required. Check every line below before this leaves your screen.
- Is the standing context — company name, city, team size, sector — left permanently in rather than turned into a placeholder? If you retype it weekly, the entry has failed.
- Are the placeholders only the genuinely varying parts? Two here is right; eight would make it tedious enough to abandon.
- Do the verify steps travel with the prompt? A prompt without its checks will be used without checks.
- Does the Notes field explain why, not just what changed? That is what protects the prompt from being helpfully simplified by a colleague.