The Standing Brief

Count how many times this week you have typed some version of the following sentence: I run a business that does X, our customers are mostly Y, we sell Z, please keep the tone conversational and stop using the word leverage.

For me it was eleven times before Thursday. Eleven times explaining my own company to something that had heard it ten times already and would forget again the moment I closed the window.

That is the tax nobody talks about. Not the subscription. The two hundred words of preamble you rewrite from scratch every session, slightly differently each time, which means the output is slightly different each time in ways you cannot trace.

The fix is not a better prompt. It is a document.

The prompt engineering era is basically over as a source of advantage. The tricks that used to produce dramatic gains, the roleplay framing, the step by step instruction, the offering of imaginary tips, mostly got trained into the models. Everybody has them now, which means nobody has them.

What still produces a genuine gap between two people using identical tools is context. How much the thing knows about your specific situation before it starts. That has not commoditized and it will not, because your situation is yours.

A Standing Brief is that context, written once, pasted or pinned everywhere. It takes about forty minutes to build. It is the highest return forty minutes available to you in this category, and I say that having spent a genuinely embarrassing number of hours on the alternatives.

Write these in plain language. Not marketing language. The version you would say out loud to a competent new hire on their first morning.

1. What the business is. Three or four sentences maximum. What you sell, to whom, how you make money, roughly how big. Resist every urge to make this sound impressive. Impressive language is vague language and vague language produces vague output.

We publish a daily newsletter for small business operators about applying AI to actual work. Roughly nine thousand subscribers. Revenue comes from two paid products and affiliate placements. Team of one plus contractors.

2. Who the customer actually is. Not a persona with a stock photo name. The real one. What they do all day, what they are worried about, what they have already tried, and critically, what they are sick of hearing.

Owner operators, five to fifty people, running the business and working in it at the same time. Time poor rather than money poor. Have tried three or four AI tools and abandoned them. Deeply tired of being told AI will transform everything without being told what to click.

3. What you sell and what it costs. List every offer with the price and one line on who it is for. Half of the bad output people get is because the tool is inventing an offer ladder that does not exist.

4. Voice rules, stated as instructions. This is where most briefs go soft. Adjectives are useless here. Professional yet approachable means nothing operationally. Give rules that can be checked.

Second person. Short sentences mixed with long ones. Contractions always. One idea per paragraph. Open with a concrete situation, never with a definition. No rhetorical questions in the first paragraph. Dry humor is fine, jokes are not.

5. The banned list. The single highest leverage block, and the one people skip. Write the exact words and constructions you never want to see.

Never use: delve, leverage as a verb, in today's fast paced world, it is not just X it is Y, unlock, game changer, revolutionize, elevate, seamless, robust. No em dashes. No sentence beginning with However.

Negative constraints outperform positive ones by a wide margin, because good is a preference the model must interpret and banned is a rule it can check. Every time you catch yourself editing out the same word for the third time, that word goes in this block permanently and you never edit it out again.

6. Hard constraints. The things that are not stylistic. Compliance language you must include, claims you cannot make, competitors you do not name, a partner you never mention. Put them here and they stop being something you have to remember to check.

7. Current state. The block that makes the brief feel like it knows you. What you are focused on this quarter, what launched recently, what is broken, what the current numbers roughly are. This is the block with a short shelf life and that is fine, it is four lines.

8. Your recurring formats. If you produce the same three or four things repeatedly, describe their shape. A weekly update is four sections in this order and runs to about this length. A sales email opens like this and closes like this. Once these are written down you stop re specifying them, and more importantly the output stops drifting between Monday and Thursday.

9. One worked example. The block everybody leaves out, and it does more work than blocks four through eight combined. Paste in one complete piece of your own output that you consider correct. Not an excerpt. A whole one.

Then paste a second one labelled as wrong, with one line explaining why. A near miss teaches far more than a good example does, because it marks the boundary rather than the center.

Do not keep this in your head or in a note you have to go find. Put it somewhere it gets applied automatically.

Most assistant tools now have a persistent instructions field or a project level context space. That is where the first six blocks belong, because they change rarely. Blocks seven through nine go in a document you paste at the top of longer sessions, since they carry the details that go stale.

If your tool supports a project or workspace, make one per major output type rather than one giant everything space. A writing project, a client work project, an analysis project. Same core brief in each, different worked example in each. The worked example is what specializes it.

There is a third place it belongs that almost nobody uses, which is inside your automations. If you have scheduled jobs that generate anything, a weekly summary, a draft reply, a first pass at a proposal, those jobs are running with whatever instruction you wrote into them eight months ago and have not looked at since. Store the brief once and have every scenario pull the same text. In Make that is a single data store record read at the top of the flow. Now when you update the brief, every automated output in your business updates with it, which is the difference between a document and a system.

The version of this that fails is the one where the brief lives in three places with three slightly different wordings. One source, referenced everywhere. If you find yourself copying it, stop and go make it a reference instead.

One line a month and a real pass every quarter. That is the whole commitment.

The monthly line is reactive: whenever you correct the same thing twice in a week, that correction becomes a rule in the brief. You are not maintaining a document, you are converting repeated annoyance into permanent instruction, which is a much more sustainable motivation.

The quarterly pass is for block seven, which will be wrong within eight weeks, and for the worked example, which should always be your best recent output rather than the thing you pasted in March.

It gets too long. Past roughly a page and a half you are diluting rather than informing. If everything is important then the weighting is flat and the model has to guess what matters. Cut the block you would not read to a new hire.

The voice section describes who you wish you were. Ambitious, visionary, thought leading. You will get output that sounds like the aspiration instead of like you, and you will spend more time editing than you saved. Describe how you actually write, including the parts you are not proud of. My own brief says I overuse the word actually. Knowing that, the output uses it about as often as I would, which is what makes it sound right.

No examples. A brief with rules and no samples is a description of a style. A brief with one good sample and one near miss is a demonstration of it. The gap between those two in output quality is not subtle.

Here is how you know yours is finished, and it takes four minutes.

Open a completely fresh session. Paste in the brief and nothing else. Then give it a one line request with no context whatsoever. Write this week's customer email. Draft a reply to a pricing objection. Outline a post about our onboarding.

Judge the result on one question only: could this have been produced by somebody who has worked for you for a month?

If yes, you are done. If it reads like a generic competent stranger, the missing piece is almost always block nine. Add the worked example and run the test again. In my experience that single addition closes most of the gap on its own.

Forty minutes to write. Call it two hundred words saved per session, times however many sessions you run in a week, times fifty weeks. The arithmetic is silly and I am not going to insult you by doing it on the page.

But the time is not the real return. The real return is consistency. Right now, the quality of what you get back depends on how carefully you explained yourself that particular morning, which means your output quality tracks your energy level. A standing brief severs that link. Tired Thursday produces the same thing as fresh Monday, because the context is no longer being reconstructed from memory each time.

That is the actual unlock, and it is the reason this sits in the Vault rather than in a list of tips. Everything else in this category is a technique. This is infrastructure.

Forty minutes. Nine blocks. Go write it before you talk yourself out of it.

Jordan

The AI Newsroom is written for people who run something. Forward it to the one person you know who needs it.