Every row gets an owner and a date
Lesson 3 of 6 · The Master List
1 · Learn the move · Enhance the Output
A list with no owner column is a list of hopes. Pin four columns and refuse a fifth: task, owner, due, source. Owner is a named person, never a department, because finance has never once done anything, people have. Due is a calendar date, never TBD and never ASAP, which both just mean no. Source is where the row came from, so in six weeks you can prove it instead of arguing about it. Tell the AI the columns, then tell it what it may not write inside them.
Normalize this into four columns: TASK (verb first), OWNER (a named person), DUE (an actual date), SOURCE (where the row came from). Banned in any cell: TBD, ASAP, ongoing, soon, and a department name in OWNER. Missing data is [NEEDS: owner] or [NEEDS: date]. Do not invent either, do not drop a row, and count rows in versus rows out. [raw list]
2 · Your turn. You write the prompt
Your master list is sixty rows spread across two notebooks and an Excel tab, and about half of them just say "follow up." The last question you could not answer out loud was "who owns this?" Write a prompt that normalizes the whole thing without inventing a single owner.
Remember: the AI sees only your prompt, not this page. If the situation isn't in your prompt, it doesn't exist.
Optional. These shape the output when you run your prompt below, not your score.