Tips & tricks

Answer clients in windows, not on demand

A reply within 24 hours is the professional standard. A reply within 5 minutes is a bar you can never lower again.

Multi-cursor editing: edit ten lines at once

Ctrl+D

Ctrl+D in VS Code selects the next occurrence of a word — and you type in all of them at once. Small refactors without find and replace.

A developer's calendar: mornings with no meetings

Coding needs 2+ uninterrupted hours — one meeting in the middle kills the whole morning. Protect your blocks as a team.

Study 5 times for an hour, not once for 5 hours

The same amount of time spread over more days means you remember multiples more. Your calendar is the strongest study tool you have.

Pomodoro: 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of break

Studying in short blocks with breaks holds your attention longer than heroic three-hour marathons. And starting is easier — it's just 25 minutes.

Your own deadline: two days before the real one

Submit by your own D−2 deadline. You get a buffer for review, printer trouble, illness — and a calm night's sleep.

Close the book and recall: the most effective study technique

Re-reading your notes creates an illusion of knowledge. Closing the book and trying to recall the material from memory — that's learning that sticks.

No agenda, no meeting

One simple rule that erases half your meetings: whoever calls the meeting sends an agenda and expected outcome in advance.

1:1s with a standing document

A shared document both sides keep adding to between meetings. The meeting has structure, and the history is easy to find.

Delegate the outcome, not the process

A good assignment has four parts: what needs to exist, why, by when, and how you'll know it's done. Leave the process to the person doing it.

A written status instead of a status meeting

Three questions in a form on Friday: what went well, what's in progress, what's stuck. Suddenly the 45-minute status meeting is unnecessary.

Office hours: availability with boundaries

Two hours a day when anyone can come to you with anything — and the rest of the day belongs to your own work. The team adjusts within a week.

In-depth guide · 21 min

AI makes things up with total confidence. Verify it

A complete guide with prompts: why models hallucinate, three verification methods, the two-source rule, and a workflow for content that leaves the company.

In-depth guide · 21 min

AI right in your editor: Copilot and friends for developers

A complete guide with prompts: three levels of assistance and when to use each, tests and refactoring, unfamiliar codebases, and agent-mode guardrails.

In-depth guide · 16 min

“Explain it to me like…” — AI as a private tutor

A complete guide with prompts: explanations at your level, the Feynman technique, test questions from your notes, and the trap of illusory understanding.

In-depth guide · 20 min

A prompt library: don't rewrite what already works

A complete guide with prompts: where to keep a library, how to version and improve prompts, how to share them in a team — and ten every library needs.

In-depth guide · 19 min

Dictate your thoughts, let AI turn them into text

A complete guide with prompts: how to dictate a usable transcript, tidy it into an email or notes with one prompt, and turn commutes into writing time.

In-depth guide · 19 min

Data Analysis with AI: From CSV to a Conclusion You Can Defend

A guide with prompts: why a language model must not do the math in chat, how to turn a table into a script that recalculates, and how not to overreach.

In-depth guide · 21 min

AI search engines with citations: research with verifiable sources

A complete guide with prompts: when to use AI search instead of Google, how to ask so the answer rests on sources — and where the tool reliably fails.

In-depth guide · 18 min

Your first conversation with AI: the complete guide for absolute beginners

A complete guide with copy-paste prompts: how to pick a tool, what to type into the first empty box, and telling a good answer from plausible nonsense.

In-depth guide · 17 min

Prepping for a negotiation in twenty minutes: research, arguments, BATNA, and rehearsal

A guide with prompts: research the other side in twenty minutes, build arguments and a walk-away point, rehearse the hardest part, and get a one-pager.

In-depth guide · 17 min

Let AI find the holes in your proposal

A complete guide with prompts for hard critique: untraining AI from agreeing with you, decision premortems, red-teaming a proposal — and when to ignore it.

In-depth guide · 17 min

Custom instructions: set up AI once, it applies forever

A complete guide to standing instructions: what belongs in them, how they differ from a Project, testing them — and ready sets for common professions.

In-depth guide · 23 min

Small scripts without coding: AI writes them for you

A complete guide with prompts: get a script written and explained, run it safely on a copy of your data, and build a tool library — without writing code.

In-depth guide · 20 min

Projects in AI: upload context once, not every time

A complete guide with prompts: what to upload to a Project, how to write its instructions, when to start a new one, and maintenance so it doesn't lie.

In-depth guide · 14 min

Excel and Sheets with AI: Formulas, Errors, Structure, and Macros

A complete guide with prompts: describe a formula in plain words and get a working fix, debug errors, design a table that holds, and when to use a macro.

In-depth guide · 19 min

From a meeting recording to notes with tasks in a minute

A complete guide with prompts: from recording consent to notes that separate decisions from discussion, list who-what-by-when tasks, and admit what's open.

In-depth guide · 17 min

Show AI a sample: the complete guide to working with examples

A complete guide with prompts: why one example beats a thousand words of instructions, when one or three, ready templates, and your own style bank.

In-depth guide · 16 min

Role, context, task, format: anatomy of a prompt that gets work done

A complete guide with prompts and a fill-in template: the same request in three versions from bad to best, picking a role, and how much context is enough.

In-depth guide · 18 min

AI translates with tone, not just words

A guide with prompts: steering translation with your own samples, translation versus localization, back-translation checks, and glossary workflows.