June 25, 2025 • 11 mins
Want to unlock more time-saving AI strategies like this? Join Inventium’s GenAI Productivity Upgrade. The next cohort starts July 14, and spots are limited. Get the details and sign up at https://inventium.com.au/genai-cohort/
***
Tired of explaining the same details every time you open a new chat with Gen AI? There’s a fix for that, and it can completely change how you work. It’s called a briefing document, and it turns Gen AI into a tool that sounds like you, knows your context, and delivers exactly what you need, without all the back-and-forth.
In this episode, Neo Aplin, Inventium’s Gen AI guru, explains how to create and use briefing documents so you get better, faster results from your AI every time.
We discuss:
- Why AI struggles to understand your context, and how briefing documents fix that
- What to include in your briefing doc (and how long it should be)
- When to use one mega document vs. multiple smaller ones
- Simple checks to make sure your AI is actually using your briefing doc
Key quotes:
“A briefing document is like a cheat sheet for your AI, so it knows your voice, your goals, and what you care about.”
“If you’re sick of hearing, ‘I hope this email finds you well,’ your AI probably isn’t reading your briefing doc.”
“Upload the document once, and you’ll spend way less time tweaking outputs.”
My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/
Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)
If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share pr
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you're sick of repeating yourself every time you open
a new chat with Jenai. You know, Here's who I am,
here's my tone, Here's what I do, then this episode
is for you. Neo Applan, Inventium's Jenai Guru is back
to walk us through one of his favorite tricks for
(00:21):
getting consistently great results from Jenai, and it's all about
having a briefing document. Welcome to How I Work, a
show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your date.
I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. Two years ago, I
(00:43):
completely overhauled how I work with Jenai and I'm now
saving over forty hours every single week. That is no exaggeration,
and that's exactly why my company, Inventium created the Jenai
Productivity Upgrade. It's a twelve whe course designed to move
you from AI doubler to productivity machine. No fluff, just
(01:06):
practical strategies that will pay off from week one, saving
you at least ten hours every single week. You'll learn
how to make AI sound exactly like you, use AI
as your second brain to excel at your job, and
so much more. Whether you're a complete beginner or already dabbling.
We've got you covered, starting with prompting fundamentals and going
(01:26):
all the way through to advanced automations and agentic AI.
We kick off on July fourteen, and spots are limited.
Visit inventium dot com, dot au, forward slash Genai hyphen
cohort to secure your place now. There's a link to
that in the show notes, and you've got nothing to
lose because there's a seven day money back guarantee, So
(01:47):
head to the link in the show notes and check
out the program today. So, Neo, what's the actual problem
that we're trying to solve for When we talk about
using briefing documents.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
JENAI generally doesn't know everything about you, and so every
time you open up a new chat thread, you need
to give it the context about what you're trying to achieve,
where you're working, potentially, your industry, all those kind of things,
and so building up that context can take a fair
bit of time. We've talked in previous episodes about getting
it to ask you questions and things like that. This
(02:21):
is all about building context so it understands a lot
more about you and it can give you a personalized
result because knowing more about you and what you're trying
to achieve. Turns it from being a pretty good result
engine into giving you an engine which produces an excellent result.
And so if you're going to give this context all
the time, it can be a little bit painful every
(02:42):
time you've got a new chat thread. So briefing documents
are a cheat fast way to get that context into
the GENAI to get a better result.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Okay, so what exactly does a briefing document look like?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Like?
Speaker 1 (02:57):
What should go into one?
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Okay, Really it's up to you and may some people
might have many briefing documents, but at its heart it
would be things like your role, what you do, the
company you work for, maybe your team structure, maybe your KPIs.
It might have some things about how you want to
work with jen AI. It might be your voice and
(03:20):
style prompts and how you want to have different tones
in there. So pretty much everything that AI would need
to know so it can do a great job. So
you don't have to give that information every single time.
So to see this as a living, breathing document of
here's me, here's what I need to do, Here's how
I need to work with you AI. Here's the briefing
document for you, and so you'll have this, you just
(03:43):
upload it to a new chat thread and then it
has a fair bit of background in what you're trying
to achieve.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
So do you recommend having the one mega briefing document
with basically a full history of your life and everything
about it, or like, in all seriousness, I should we
be splitting them out and having different categories of briefing documents.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I do recommend that, Yes, for most people, you might
find that one briefing document is fine and enough. But
you might find that you might have maybe there's a
project at work and you need to have a lot
of background for this particular project. The people as different stakeholders,
different needs, different goals, different communications you need to build
(04:24):
for it. In that case, I would have a separate
briefing document to say me my normal job and certainly
one from my own personal life. So I would recommend
most people would have two to three briefing documents, one
for each kind of facet on why you would want
to use GENAI. The fewer the briefing documents is better
(04:44):
because you're not going to confuse the AI. It's going
to know if you're talking about project day with a
project day briefing document that it's only going to have
all information for that and it doesn't need to know
anything else, so it won't get confused as much. So
the other thing about that is it's a smaller document,
which means it won't fill up the context window, which
is its short term memory. Gives it a little bit
(05:04):
more memory there for it as well.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Okay, so when you say shorter document, I mean how
many pages in a word document should it ideally be
kept under.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
I'd say under ten pages for sure. I'd say five
pages is probably a good number for a briefing document.
So if you're going to blow over five pages, I'd
say look at maybe splitting it up into two or
maybe three briefing documents.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Okay, so let's imagine that I've created a briefing document.
How does that actually change how I'm prompting the AI
to do the task that I want it to do.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
All you need to do is, in each new thread,
you upload the briefing document and then you ask your question,
but also get it to refer to the briefing document.
So you might upload the document say I need you
to do this task, refer to the briefing document for
the tone, or for the background, or for the context
and things like that, and then Jenna I will get
(06:00):
all the information from the briefing document and put it
in the outcome. So here's an example. You might say,
I need to write an email to a stakeholder on
a project. Here's the project briefing document. It will then
know your name, it'll know what you're trying to achieve,
it'll know who that stakeholder is, and will then be
able to craft the email in a right way for
(06:20):
that project, for you and for that stakeholder. So the
first draft is a lot closer to what you need
rather than just a generic first draft of an email
to any kind of person. This one will sound like you.
It'll fit with your needs and your context and what
you're trying to achieve a lot faster, so it's less
tweaking for you to have to do later on.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Okay, so let's imagine I'm in a thread. I've prompted
the AI to do the task with the briefing document
within that thread, do I need to keep reminding the
AI to refer to the briefing document or once I've
uploaded it, does it just remember and it knows always
refer to this briefing document for this thread.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
There are a couple of reasons why you would need
to remind it to look at the briefing document. One
of them is some of the genais they want to
draw information from their own memory rather than from documents
who have uploaded, and so sometimes they forget that they
need to refer to this briefing document. They call it
prompt adherents. So all you need to do is, if
(07:22):
it's not referring to it, all you need to do
is write the words, make sure you refer to the
briefing document, and then it all redo its last response
and give you a much better response from there. Other
things you need to have to use with the briefing
document is if you're having a really long conversation with
the genai, it might run out of its short term
(07:42):
memory that context window, so you may need to re
upload it and re remind it if you need to.
But most of the time they're pretty good in being
able to recognize that you have this briefing document and
you continually refer to it, and so therefore it needs
to continually refer to it as well.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Okay, are there any simple tests that you have built
in to just check, oh it is the GENAI. Still
referring to the brief email documents.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, you will know that. Most of the time, I've
got a little cheat's way, which is, whenever it writes emails,
I hate that GENAI loves to write, I hope this
email finds you well. I'm sure people have seen that.
It's a common sign for this is written by AI.
It's the same thing as the m dash being in there.
So I've got a line at the bottom of my
(08:29):
briefing document. So for any email, never write I hope
this email finds you well. And if I find that indeed,
I'm getting it to write me an email and it
does say hype funds you well, then clearly it's not
reading everything in the briefing document or it's not taking
that into account with its output. And so that's a
great tell for me to see that it isn't reading
(08:50):
the briefing document. Same thing you might want to use
is Australian English right in there. Use Australian English spelling,
but not aussieisms, otherwise it'll go guy mate. And if
it starts talking in America, and then you'll know that
it hasn't actually read everything in the briefing document, so
you might need to re upload it or re reminded
of the briefing document. So there's two great techniques there.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Okay, So one final question, I mean, is this the
same as building a custom GPT in chat GPT or
a gem in Gemini? Like, are we talking about the
same thing here?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Your kind of It's the document itself can be used
in so many different ways. So the first one is
some people like to use more than one Genai, so
they can say, oh, I got one output from a Jenai,
I don't want a second opinion from another Jenai. In
this case, I can upload my briefing document to both
of them and then I can get different responses. So
(09:43):
that's one of the great ways. The other is some
people don't have the paid plans, and so if you
don't have the paid plan, you cannot build your own
custom GPT, so therefore there's not available for you. There's
also another one which is in the Microsoft ecosystem. Their
agents are slightly different to the GPTs, and I've found
(10:03):
they sometimes work differently with briefing documents. So it's great
to have these documents as a core tool. But yes,
if you do upload them into a GPT or a
projecting Claude or a gem in Gemini, then these are
the core source knowledge for each of these. So whether
you're using these great tools, GPTs or gems, this briefing
(10:27):
document is a great tool you'll need anyway.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Nio, thank you so much. I know that for me
creating different briefing documents has been such a time saver,
So for anyone listening, I strongly encourage you to try
this out today. If you like today's Joe, make sure
you follow on your podcast app to be alerted when
new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the
(10:53):
traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Cool
And Nation. A big thank you to Martin Immer for
doing the sound mix.
If you're sick of repeating yourself every time you open
a new chat with Jenai. You know, Here's who I am,
here's my tone, Here's what I do, then this episode
is for you. Neo Applan, Inventium's Jenai Guru is back
to walk us through one of his favorite tricks for
(00:21):
getting consistently great results from Jenai, and it's all about
having a briefing document. Welcome to How I Work, a
show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your date.
I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. Two years ago, I
(00:43):
completely overhauled how I work with Jenai and I'm now
saving over forty hours every single week. That is no exaggeration,
and that's exactly why my company, Inventium created the Jenai
Productivity Upgrade. It's a twelve whe course designed to move
you from AI doubler to productivity machine. No fluff, just
(01:06):
practical strategies that will pay off from week one, saving
you at least ten hours every single week. You'll learn
how to make AI sound exactly like you, use AI
as your second brain to excel at your job, and
so much more. Whether you're a complete beginner or already dabbling.
We've got you covered, starting with prompting fundamentals and going
(01:26):
all the way through to advanced automations and agentic AI.
We kick off on July fourteen, and spots are limited.
Visit inventium dot com, dot au, forward slash Genai hyphen
cohort to secure your place now. There's a link to
that in the show notes, and you've got nothing to
lose because there's a seven day money back guarantee, So
(01:47):
head to the link in the show notes and check
out the program today. So, Neo, what's the actual problem
that we're trying to solve for When we talk about
using briefing documents.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
JENAI generally doesn't know everything about you, and so every
time you open up a new chat thread, you need
to give it the context about what you're trying to achieve,
where you're working, potentially, your industry, all those kind of things,
and so building up that context can take a fair
bit of time. We've talked in previous episodes about getting
it to ask you questions and things like that. This
(02:21):
is all about building context so it understands a lot
more about you and it can give you a personalized
result because knowing more about you and what you're trying
to achieve. Turns it from being a pretty good result
engine into giving you an engine which produces an excellent result.
And so if you're going to give this context all
the time, it can be a little bit painful every
(02:42):
time you've got a new chat thread. So briefing documents
are a cheat fast way to get that context into
the GENAI to get a better result.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Okay, so what exactly does a briefing document look like?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Like?
Speaker 1 (02:57):
What should go into one?
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Okay, Really it's up to you and may some people
might have many briefing documents, but at its heart it
would be things like your role, what you do, the
company you work for, maybe your team structure, maybe your KPIs.
It might have some things about how you want to
work with jen AI. It might be your voice and
(03:20):
style prompts and how you want to have different tones
in there. So pretty much everything that AI would need
to know so it can do a great job. So
you don't have to give that information every single time.
So to see this as a living, breathing document of
here's me, here's what I need to do, Here's how
I need to work with you AI. Here's the briefing
document for you, and so you'll have this, you just
(03:43):
upload it to a new chat thread and then it
has a fair bit of background in what you're trying
to achieve.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
So do you recommend having the one mega briefing document
with basically a full history of your life and everything
about it, or like, in all seriousness, I should we
be splitting them out and having different categories of briefing documents.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I do recommend that, Yes, for most people, you might
find that one briefing document is fine and enough. But
you might find that you might have maybe there's a
project at work and you need to have a lot
of background for this particular project. The people as different stakeholders,
different needs, different goals, different communications you need to build
(04:24):
for it. In that case, I would have a separate
briefing document to say me my normal job and certainly
one from my own personal life. So I would recommend
most people would have two to three briefing documents, one
for each kind of facet on why you would want
to use GENAI. The fewer the briefing documents is better
(04:44):
because you're not going to confuse the AI. It's going
to know if you're talking about project day with a
project day briefing document that it's only going to have
all information for that and it doesn't need to know
anything else, so it won't get confused as much. So
the other thing about that is it's a smaller document,
which means it won't fill up the context window, which
is its short term memory. Gives it a little bit
(05:04):
more memory there for it as well.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Okay, so when you say shorter document, I mean how
many pages in a word document should it ideally be
kept under.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
I'd say under ten pages for sure. I'd say five
pages is probably a good number for a briefing document.
So if you're going to blow over five pages, I'd
say look at maybe splitting it up into two or
maybe three briefing documents.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Okay, so let's imagine that I've created a briefing document.
How does that actually change how I'm prompting the AI
to do the task that I want it to do.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
All you need to do is, in each new thread,
you upload the briefing document and then you ask your question,
but also get it to refer to the briefing document.
So you might upload the document say I need you
to do this task, refer to the briefing document for
the tone, or for the background, or for the context
and things like that, and then Jenna I will get
(06:00):
all the information from the briefing document and put it
in the outcome. So here's an example. You might say,
I need to write an email to a stakeholder on
a project. Here's the project briefing document. It will then
know your name, it'll know what you're trying to achieve,
it'll know who that stakeholder is, and will then be
able to craft the email in a right way for
(06:20):
that project, for you and for that stakeholder. So the
first draft is a lot closer to what you need
rather than just a generic first draft of an email
to any kind of person. This one will sound like you.
It'll fit with your needs and your context and what
you're trying to achieve a lot faster, so it's less
tweaking for you to have to do later on.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Okay, so let's imagine I'm in a thread. I've prompted
the AI to do the task with the briefing document
within that thread, do I need to keep reminding the
AI to refer to the briefing document or once I've
uploaded it, does it just remember and it knows always
refer to this briefing document for this thread.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
There are a couple of reasons why you would need
to remind it to look at the briefing document. One
of them is some of the genais they want to
draw information from their own memory rather than from documents
who have uploaded, and so sometimes they forget that they
need to refer to this briefing document. They call it
prompt adherents. So all you need to do is, if
(07:22):
it's not referring to it, all you need to do
is write the words, make sure you refer to the
briefing document, and then it all redo its last response
and give you a much better response from there. Other
things you need to have to use with the briefing
document is if you're having a really long conversation with
the genai, it might run out of its short term
(07:42):
memory that context window, so you may need to re
upload it and re remind it if you need to.
But most of the time they're pretty good in being
able to recognize that you have this briefing document and
you continually refer to it, and so therefore it needs
to continually refer to it as well.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Okay, are there any simple tests that you have built
in to just check, oh it is the GENAI. Still
referring to the brief email documents.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, you will know that. Most of the time, I've
got a little cheat's way, which is, whenever it writes emails,
I hate that GENAI loves to write, I hope this
email finds you well. I'm sure people have seen that.
It's a common sign for this is written by AI.
It's the same thing as the m dash being in there.
So I've got a line at the bottom of my
(08:29):
briefing document. So for any email, never write I hope
this email finds you well. And if I find that indeed,
I'm getting it to write me an email and it
does say hype funds you well, then clearly it's not
reading everything in the briefing document or it's not taking
that into account with its output. And so that's a
great tell for me to see that it isn't reading
(08:50):
the briefing document. Same thing you might want to use
is Australian English right in there. Use Australian English spelling,
but not aussieisms, otherwise it'll go guy mate. And if
it starts talking in America, and then you'll know that
it hasn't actually read everything in the briefing document, so
you might need to re upload it or re reminded
of the briefing document. So there's two great techniques there.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Okay, So one final question, I mean, is this the
same as building a custom GPT in chat GPT or
a gem in Gemini? Like, are we talking about the
same thing here?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Your kind of It's the document itself can be used
in so many different ways. So the first one is
some people like to use more than one Genai, so
they can say, oh, I got one output from a Jenai,
I don't want a second opinion from another Jenai. In
this case, I can upload my briefing document to both
of them and then I can get different responses. So
(09:43):
that's one of the great ways. The other is some
people don't have the paid plans, and so if you
don't have the paid plan, you cannot build your own
custom GPT, so therefore there's not available for you. There's
also another one which is in the Microsoft ecosystem. Their
agents are slightly different to the GPTs, and I've found
(10:03):
they sometimes work differently with briefing documents. So it's great
to have these documents as a core tool. But yes,
if you do upload them into a GPT or a
projecting Claude or a gem in Gemini, then these are
the core source knowledge for each of these. So whether
you're using these great tools, GPTs or gems, this briefing
(10:27):
document is a great tool you'll need anyway.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Nio, thank you so much. I know that for me
creating different briefing documents has been such a time saver,
So for anyone listening, I strongly encourage you to try
this out today. If you like today's Joe, make sure
you follow on your podcast app to be alerted when
new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the
(10:53):
traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Cool
And Nation. A big thank you to Martin Immer for
doing the sound mix.
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