I started collecting reusable prompts as I found or built ones that worked, and put them into a Microsoft List in Teams so the rest of my team could use them too — and add to it themselves.
I categorised prompts into a handful of groups: preparing for meetings, creating notes, catching up after time off, and everything else.
Where the prompts came from
Some of the prompts I developed were inspired by the Rundown course:
“I want to produce x, and the audience is y. Interview me to understand the task better and how I would like the output delivered. Do this one multiple choice question at a time.”
Others came from wanting to improve on what standard Copilot training offered. Instead of the generic “Help me prepare for meeting z”, something closer to:
“Help me prepare for meeting z. Use information from the most recent system call notes
[folder link], operational resilience chat updates from the last 24 hours, any attachments I have added, and any relevant emails I have received today. Deliver the output structured as per the meeting agenda/attached template.”
And some I found elsewhere. One addition to the library was a prompt on systems thinking from Matt Shumer, whose prompt site I’d already been drawing on — I thought it would be useful for colleagues thinking about our work at a system-operations level, so I added it in.
The one I used most: catching up after leave
My favourite, and the one I reached for almost every time I’d been away — annual leave, a run of days off, anything more than a day or two — asked a single question up front: how long had you been off, or when had you last been at work. From that it would go and search across three different Teams chat threads the team used day to day, pull in the system call notes from while you’d been away, and also try to pull in anything from the regional operational meetings we were regularly invited to. It checked the staff intranet as well, for anything organisational.
It then summarised all of that into a structure that mattered for actually getting back up to speed: things that had happened while you were away that you needed to know about, and things that were still live, ongoing themes — particularly anything that had been a recurring theme over the last forty-eight hours and was still relevant that day. It split all of that three ways too — what was relevant just to the team, what was relevant to the wider organisation, and what was relevant specifically to the operational work we did.
It wasn’t a one-off. I used it as a matter of routine, essentially every time I came back from being away.
Sources: written from my own recollection. There’s no chat record for this work, because it predates my exported chat history and involved NHS operational data, so the underlying documents, data and the exact prompts aren’t reproduced here. The three quoted example prompts are my own earlier writing.