You will be able to get an outline or plan from the assistant, correct it, and then have it do each part.
Aisha is writing a retreat proposal for her director. Her first attempt, described in lesson 3.1, "Why one giant prompt gives you a mediocre result", ended with four empty pages, partly because the assistant assumed the retreat was a one-day event. This time she asks the assistant for a plan first and approves it before any of the proposal gets written.
Aisha starts again. Her first request ends with one extra sentence: give an outline as section headings with one line on what each will contain, and do not write the proposal yet. The outline comes back in a few seconds and has seven sections.
Two of the seven are wrong. One covers team-building activities, which her director had said he did not want. The other assumes a one-day event, the same mistake as before. She fixes both in a single message, so the proposal that follows is built on the right foundations from the first line. In her earlier attempt, the one-day assumption had spread into the costs, the venues and the recommendation, while in the outline it was a single line.
The plan or outline is the structure the model produces before it drafts anything. It can take whatever form fits the job:
For a report or proposal, section headings with one line under each. For a project, a numbered list of steps. For a long document, a table of contents with one sentence per chapter. For an analysis, the questions it will answer and the order it will answer them in.
The instruction has two halves, and you need both. Ask for the plan, and say not to write the full piece yet. If you only ask for an outline, many assistants will give it and then go on to write the whole piece anyway. Saying "do not write the full piece yet" keeps the work at the stage where changes are cheap.
You can ask for more than headings. For anything with numbers in it, ask what facts or figures each section will need. The answer shows you early which facts the model plans to supply itself. Those are the facts it may invent, so you can give it the real ones instead.
Correcting a plan takes about a minute (the minute and the hour are an illustration, not measured times). Aisha only had to read seven lines, then cross one out, add one or reorder them. Fixing a finished draft built on a bad plan takes much longer, because the mistake has spread across the whole draft instead of sitting in one place.
Planning first also improves the quality of the work. When you approve the plan, you make the key decisions: what goes in, what stays out, and in what order. You are better placed to make those calls than the model, because you know the people involved, the budget and the history. If you let the model make them silently inside a long draft, you hand over the most important part of the job.
Once the plan is agreed, ask for one section at a time and give a target length, for example: "Now write section 2, venue options ... About 300 words." Read what comes back, correct it, then move on to the next section.
Working this way lets you add what each section needs at the point it needs it, including facts that did not exist when the plan was written. Before asking for the cost comparison, Aisha pastes in the three quotes she received from venues, so the model works from real figures instead of guessing. Before the recommendation section, she adds something her director said in a meeting: he cared more about everyone getting a proper room than about the venue being fancy. Neither the quotes nor his comment was available when the plan was written, and both changed the sections they went into.
You can also change your mind partway through. The cost section shows that one venue is well over budget, so Aisha tells the assistant to drop that venue from the rest of the proposal. With a single giant request, the same change would mean starting over.
In a long chat, the agreed plan can slip out of the model's attention. This is called drift. As a conversation grows, the early messages fade, so by section six the model may lose track of what section two promised. AI fundamentals lesson 5.2, "Why long chats drift and big files get skimmed", explains why this happens.
Two habits help. The first is to paste the approved plan back in with each new section request, or at least every few sections. Pasting the agreed plan above a request such as "Now write section 5" takes seconds and keeps every section tied to the same plan. The second is for bigger jobs you will come back to over several days: keep the plan in a project with its own instructions and files. The plan then sits beside every chat in that project and doesn't scroll away. Lesson 6.2, "Projects: a workspace for each recurring job", covers this.
If the chat still wanders, move the work into a clean conversation without losing what was agreed. Lesson 4.3, "Edit, regenerate, or start a fresh chat", shows how.
The pattern is simple enough to try on anything with more than one section. Choose a report, proposal or plan you need to produce in the next few weeks, and have your context paragraph ready before you ask for the outline.
Ask an assistant for an outline of a report you need. Make at least two changes to it, then have it draft the first section only.
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