Questioning
What is missing to answer
Any request of any weight, the kind you can feel will come back half done.
How it goes
do it yourself- Write your request as you usually would, but do not send the instruction to carry it out yet.
- Ask first what is missing in order to answer properly, requiring the gaps to be sorted by what they cost.
- Answer only the first two or three, then let it run.
The instruction, word for word
copy it, then correct it[your request] Before producing anything: what are you missing in order to answer this properly? Sort the gaps into three groups: - those without which you cannot answer at all; - those that would change your answer without preventing it; - those you can do without, provided you flag it in your answer. Guess nothing until I have answered the first group.
- The three groups
- Without the sorting you get fifteen equivalent questions and deal with none. With it, you deal with three and stop.
- The third group
- The most useful one: it turns the remaining gaps into caveats written into the answer, instead of holes quietly filled.
What you get out of it
The answer comes back a notch better. But the real result is elsewhere: you discover what you had not said and assumed was obvious. That list is the first draft of the standing instruction you will keep, and it fills itself in as the requests go by.
Going further
Keep the gaps flagged three times running. The ones that come back are not oversights: they are the lines structurally missing from the way you ask.