Before you start

CRIT is for setting something new up from scratch, which is what the stages of this course are.

Nobody needs four labelled sections on a message asking what time a shop shuts, and dictating your context covers the day to day.

It stands for Context, Role, Interview, Task.

I picked it up from Geoff Woods on Codie Sanchez's BigDeal podcast, and it is what I reach for whenever I am setting up a new part of my own ecosystem.

• C

  Context

  Everything about what you are doing, dictated, and when you think that is enough, give it more.

• R

  Role

  Who you would actually want the advice from, specific rather than “a world-class expert”, because that makes the answer sound more certain without making it better.

• I

  Interview

  Have it interview you one question at a time before it answers, and let it run until it has what it needs.

• T

  Task

  The finished thing you want, which is the short part by the time you reach it.

Here is the shape as a prompt, with the capitals for you to fill in.

Roughly three quarters of a good prompt is context, and the other three split what is left.

It is the shape for the jobs where you would normally hire someone, and you will recognise a few of these:

• A proposal for a client, where the context is everything you know about them and what they said on the call.
• A contract or a retainer, where the context is how you want the arrangement to work and what has gone wrong before.
• A job description for your first hire, where the context is what you are actually drowning in.
• A plan for the quarter, where the context is the numbers, what you tried last quarter and what came of it.
• A difficult email, where the context is the history with that person and what you need to come out of it.

Note: Once you have the draft, ask it to spin up a few subagents to review it, each from a different angle, and hunt for what the first pass missed.