We’ve all read the advice on crafting a good AI prompt: Define your persona, give it a task, and describe your context and format. In theory, this makes sense. But from personal experience, sometimes writing out the entire prompt takes longer than doing the task myself. I used to fall into this trap all the time. I’d sit down to work on a task, spend five minutes crafting the perfect prompt on an LLM, and then realise I could have just done the task manually. My quest to become the perfect prompt engineer became a bottleneck, not a shortcut. If I really wanted to integrate AI into my work, I needed a better way. Here are two techniques that I’ve found helpful. Use Text Expanders for High-Speed, Low-Context Tasks I first learned about text expanders from productivity YouTuber Jeff Su. What’s a text expander? It’s basically a shortcut that replaces a short snippet with a longer piece of text. It’s...