I Let GPT Summarize Internal Docs and Saved Half a Day
Summarizing meeting notes and vendor proposals used to take up a third of my workday, but starting this week I’ve been handling it with a single prompt.
The key wasn’t saying "summarize this" — it was giving it a fixed format.
- A 3-line summary
- Items requiring decisions / owner / deadline in a table
- Never add anything that isn’t in the original text
That last line turned out to be really important. Without it, it makes up deadlines that don’t exist. lol
Some documents still can’t be pasted as-is into an external API under company policy, so I handle those manually, but even doing just the rest, it feels like I’ve cut half a day.
8 answers
Agreed — without the last line, GPT just lets its imagination run wild lol
Could you share a more detailed prompt example? Specifying the table format is the hardest part for me, so my output format is inconsistent every time. Especially when extracting owners/deadlines, if the original text only says "to be discussed later," it ends up inventing an owner. How do you prevent that?
Well, that's a bit... Doesn't saying you saved half a day basically mean you skipped review time? Once you factor in the time spent checking the summary, it didn't feel like it dropped as much as it seemed.
I use something similar, and I’ve found that “mark unverifiable items as TBD” works better than “do not add content that isn’t in the original.” Just a tip.