I watched my wife waste an hour fighting ChatGPT. Then I told her to stop typing. Three hours later she had a complete marketing plan.
Courtney is brilliant. She's also a typical entrepreneur with high-functioning ADD. And she was getting nowhere.
Here's what she was doing, and what almost everyone does. Type a question. Read the answer. React. Type a follow-up. React again. Twenty minutes later she was three rabbit holes deep and the original question was gone.
The squirrels win every time.
So I gave her two rules.
Rule 1. Talk, don't type.
Hit the voice button. Just talk. You speak three times faster than you type. The grammar will be ugly. The spelling will be worse. Let it go. The AI does not care.
Rule 2. Tell the bot to interview you.
This is the move that changed everything. Instead of asking for a marketing plan, she said, "Interview me about my business. One question at a time. Stay on this topic. Do not give me a plan until you have asked every question you need."
The bot fought her at first. Tried to dump three questions at once. She corrected it. After a few rounds it locked in. Smart questions. Then smarter ones. Then it started pushing back on her assumptions.
Three hours. One session. She walked away with a marketing plan, a KPI dashboard, and a content calendar. She was floored.
"AI is not a search bar. AI is a conversation."
If you treat it like Google you get Google answers. If you treat it like a colleague who just walked into your office, you get colleague work.
Two more habits that compound it.
Give it context like you would a new hire. I don't expect new employees to read my mind. I train them. I hand them documents. I tell them who I am, who the audience is, what done looks like. If the output is bad, that's on me. I didn't train it.
Iterate. Your first prompt is a draft. Your tenth is the real one. Most people quit at two.
Try it this week. Pick one task you've been putting off. Open ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini. Hit the voice button. Say, "Interview me on this, one question at a time, until you have what you need."
Then sit back and answer.
What's the one task you'd try this on?