Summarising: long into essential in a minute
50-email threads, 30-page reports, hour-long meeting recordings — extract what matters in the right cut: decisions and actions, risks, numbers. The skill: order the slice you need, not 'a summary'.
"Summarise this" is a weak order — you'll get a retelling. A strong order names the slice you want.
Slices, not retellings
- Decisions and actions: "From this thread: what was decided, who's doing what, by when. Table: decision | owner | deadline"
- Risks: "What in this report should worry me? The 5 biggest risks, with quotes"
- Numbers: "Pull out every figure with its context: metric | value | trend"
- For forwarding: "Recap this for the director in 5 bullets: the essentials and what's needed from him"
The summary formula
For whom + why + format. "For me, to get up to speed before the meeting, 7 bullets" and "for the client, so they confirm the terms, 3 paragraphs" turn one text into two different summaries — both of them correct.
Email threads: their own genre
Paste the whole thread and ask: "Reconstruct the chronology: who proposed what, where we landed, what's still open." Those open questions are the gold: everyone has forgotten them, and the AI will find them.
Guarding against hallucination
A summary is compression, and while compressing a model can quietly fill in blanks. The rule: if you're making a decision off a summary, check the key point against the original (search the document — it takes seconds). For anything important, ask for receipts: "back every bullet with a quote from the text".
Practice
Take this week's longest work thread and turn it into a "decision | owner | deadline" table plus a list of open questions. Send it round to everyone involved — you'll see the effect.
Short questions on the lesson — with an explanation for every answer.