You will complete a substantial piece of work by chaining smaller requests and checking each step.
Each lesson in this module has given you one move. Lesson 3.1, Why one giant prompt gives you a mediocre result, showed why to split a big job. Lesson 3.2 had you ask for the plan before the work, lesson 3.3 let the assistant ask you questions first, and lesson 3.4 showed when a reasoning mode earns its time. In this exercise you put them together on a real piece of work, from blank page to finished document, and keep a record of what happened at each step.
Set aside about forty minutes. The task does not need to be finished in one sitting, but the steps should be done in order.
Pick something you actually need to produce, with enough substance to have several sections. A proposal, a project plan, a training guide, a policy explainer for your team or a detailed handover note all work. Avoid anything shorter than a page, because the chain will feel like overkill, and avoid anything that contains confidential client data you are not allowed to put into your assistant.
Aisha chose a training guide for the six graduates from lesson 3.3: how to record their time on the firm's timesheet system, which new staff always got wrong in their first month. She had written a similar guide by hand the year before, which gave her something to compare against.
Before you start, open a document for your step log. Each step gets an entry: the prompt, what you corrected, and roughly how long it took.
The chain runs in a fixed order. Do not skip ahead, even when the output of a step looks good enough to jump past the next one.
Step 1, questions first: give your context and task, and ask for up to five questions before it starts. Answer them, then ask it to restate the brief. Step 2, outline: ask for an outline with a line on what each section will contain, tell it not to write the full piece yet, and fix the outline before going on. Step 3, section drafts: ask for one section at a time, pasting in any facts, figures or source text that section needs, and correct each one as it arrives. Step 4, critique: in a fresh chat, paste the full draft and ask for its three weakest points and any claims likely to be wrong. Step 5, final edit: back in the main chat, ask for the fixes you agree with, then a final pass for length and wording.
Step 4 is in a fresh chat on purpose. A chat that has just written the draft tends to defend it. Module 7 explains why, and what a critique like this can and cannot catch.
The value of the chain comes from what you do between steps. After each output, read it against your brief and fix anything wrong before you ask for the next thing. Then write a line in your log.
Here is what Aisha's log looked like, in shortened form. Step 1: the questions asked whether graduates would use the system on laptops or phones, which she had not mentioned; she answered laptops only. Step 2: the outline had a section on approving timesheets, which graduates do not do; she removed it and added one on the three most common mistakes. Step 3: the section on billing codes invented a code format, so she pasted in the real list of codes and asked for a redraft. Step 4: the critique pointed out that the guide never said what to do if you forgot to submit on Friday, a fair point she had missed. Step 5: she asked for that fix and for the guide to fit on two pages.
Notice that the corrections were mostly about facts only she had. That is typical. The chain does not make the model know your business, but it gives you five places to put that knowledge in, instead of one.
When you finish, add up the time from your log and compare it with how long a similar task took you without an assistant, being honest about both and counting the time spent reading and correcting as well as typing prompts.
Aisha's steps took 15, 10, 40, 10 and 15 minutes, which comes to 90 minutes. These are her figures, given as an example. Last year's hand-written guide had taken her most of an afternoon. The time saved was real but smaller than she expected, because the section drafts needed real checking. The bigger difference was quality: the critique step caught a gap that last year's guide had too, and nobody had noticed for twelve months.
Your result may be different. Some tasks come out faster and about the same quality, some slower and better, and occasionally the chain is not worth it for a task you know very well. All of those are useful findings, and they feed straight into the decisions you will make in module 9 about which tasks get a saved template.
You should end with two things. The first is the finished piece, checked and ready to use or send. The second is the step log: five entries, each with the prompt, what you corrected and the time taken, plus a total and a sentence comparing it with doing the job without AI.
Keep the prompts from your log. The ones from steps 1, 2 and 4 in particular are easy to reuse on the next big task, almost word for word. Now pick your task, open the log, and write the context paragraph that will start step 1.
Produce the finished piece plus a step log showing each prompt, what you corrected and the total time taken.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).