No Magic Words · Buy the book →
Copy this. Fill it in once. Paste it at the start of substantive sessions. Fifteen minutes to build.
Copy this. Fill it in once. Paste it at the start of substantive sessions.
Fifteen minutes to build. It removes a tax you currently pay on every session without noticing. See Chapter 3.
# Context
## Who I am
[Role. What I'm responsible for. Who my output
goes to. What I'm usually trying to accomplish.
Two or three sentences — not a bio.]
Example:
> I run product marketing for a B2B analytics
> company, ~40 people. My output goes to our
> sales team, our exec team, and occasionally
> customers. Most of what I write is trying to
> make a technical capability legible to someone
> non-technical without dumbing it down.
## How I write
[Paste 2–3 things you ACTUALLY wrote. A real
email, a Slack message, a paragraph you were
happy with. Include at least one SHORT one —
your chat register is more clipped than your
email register, and a model given only formal
samples will make everything formal.]
[Do not write adjectives here. "Professional but
warm" tells the model nothing it can act on.
Examples carry register, rhythm and sentence
length in a way descriptions cannot.]
SAMPLE 1 (email):
> [paste]
SAMPLE 2 (chat/short):
> [paste]
SAMPLE 3 (something you were proud of):
> [paste]
## People and things I reference constantly
[The shorthand you'd otherwise re-explain every time.]
- **[Name]** — [role, what they care about,
how to write to them]
- **[Project codename]** — [what it actually is,
current status]
- **[Recurring doc]** — [what it is, who reads it]
## Standing constraints
[The rules that apply to everything.]
- Never commit me to a date, number or scope
I haven't stated.
- Flag anything you're inferring rather than
drawing from what I gave you.
- Don't add points I didn't include — list them
separately at the end instead.
- Don't resolve questions I left open. If I
hedged, keep the hedge.
- [Words/phrases I won't use: ...]
- [Format I prefer: ...]
## Verification default
Default tier: 1 (read it before using it).
Tier 2 — verify the load-bearing claims — for
anything with numbers, names, dates, citations,
or claims I'd repeat.
Tier 3 — reconstruct independently, or don't use
AI — for anything with legal, financial, safety
or public exposure.Build it, then let it stabilize. It’ll be wrong at first. Every time you catch yourself typing background you’ve typed before, that belongs in the file. It should settle in about two weeks and then barely change.
Three or four packs maximum. A core pack plus two or three project- or audience-specific ones. The failure mode is a library so elaborate that maintaining it becomes its own job. Three files you actually update beat twelve you don’t.
The constraints section is the one people skip and shouldn’t. Those four default lines exist because of four specific failures documented in this book: an invented launch date (Chapter 3), an unassigned task promoted to a tracked commitment (Chapter 7), recommendations nobody requested arriving inside a summary (Chapter 9), and a deliberately unresolved question quietly resolved (Chapter 4). One line each. Each line is a scar.
Plain text. Not locked inside one product. Tools churn; your context shouldn’t have to migrate.
You already have the template — it's above, and it's yours. What the list adds is the three pieces the book was built from, and a note whenever the book itself is corrected. No other email.