Beat the Blank Page: the simplest AI productivity win.
From a live TESS Group AI workshop · captions included
“The point is not to prompt it into creating something that's perfect. The point is to say: for the sake of three and a half minutes, I have catapulted myself ahead of the blank Word document I would have been starting from, because I can now edit this.”
If you only take one AI habit from a TESS workshop, it's this one. Stop asking AI for perfection; use it to skip the blank page and spend your time editing instead.
Transcript
The point, though, is not to prompt it into creating something that's perfect. The point is to say: right, for the sake of three and a half minutes, I have catapulted myself ahead of the blank white Word document I would have been starting with to write a process description, because I can now edit this. OK, it's looked at an old document, and I'm going to have to change a few things, but look how far I managed to get. And then in 15 or 20 minutes I can get to the product I wanted it to be.
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Why editing beats prompting for perfection
The productivity gain in generative AI is mostly in the first draft, not the final one. A rough version produced in three minutes turns a writing task into an editing task, and most people edit far faster than they write from nothing. The habit that sticks is: ask for a draft of the right shape, then spend your time on judgement, facts and tone. Learners practise this in the first module of every TESS AI apprenticeship, and it is the basis of the prompt engineering workshop. Test your own prompts with the free AI Prompt Scorer.