Summarising & Understanding

Long reports, terms and conditions, research articles, meeting notes, a 40-message email thread: there's more to read than time to read it. Assistants are excellent at compressing text and explaining it. Today you'll learn to get summaries you can actually use, and to know when a summary isn't enough.

Ask for the summary you need

"Summarise this" works, but you'll get a more useful result if you say what kind of summary and who it's for:

Summarise this report for my manager, who has 2 minutes. Give the 5 most important findings as bullet points, then one sentence on what we should do next.
 
[paste the report]

Other useful shapes:

• "Summarise in one paragraph for someone with no background in the topic."
• "What are the 3 arguments the author makes, and what evidence supports each?"
• "Give me a TL;DR (one sentence), then the details."
• "What does this article say about [your specific question]?"

Pull out actions and decisions

Meeting notes and long email threads hide the things you actually need. Ask for them directly:

From the meeting notes below, make a table with three columns: action, who is responsible, and deadline. If an action has no owner or deadline, write "not set". Then list any decisions that were made.
 
[paste the notes]

The "not set" instruction is useful: it stops the assistant inventing an owner or date to fill the gap, and shows you what still needs agreeing.

Explain it simply

Assistants are patient explainers. Paste in something confusing and ask what it means for you:

Explain this letter from my energy supplier in plain English. What is it telling me, do I need to do anything, and by when?
 
[paste the letter, with your account number removed]

Follow up freely: "What does 'standing charge' mean?", "Give me an example with numbers", "Explain it like I'm 12."

Ask questions about a document

Instead of a summary, you can interview a document. Ask the assistant to back each answer with a quote, so you can check it:

Using only the tenancy agreement below, answer these questions. For each answer, quote the sentence it's based on. If the agreement doesn't say, write "not stated".
 
1. How much notice do I need to give to leave?
2. Am I allowed to have a pet?
3. Who pays for repairs to the boiler?
 
[paste the agreement]

Know the limits

Two more practical limits:

• Very long documents. Assistants can handle a lot of text, but quality drops at the edges. For a book-length document, summarise it section by section.
• Scanned or image-only PDFs. Some tools can read them, some can't. If the answer seems unrelated to the document, the text may not have been read correctly.

Recap

• Say what kind of summary you want and who it's for: key points, a paragraph, a table.
• Extract what matters from notes: actions, owners, deadlines, decisions; ask it to write "not set" for gaps.
• Ask assistants to explain confusing text and tell you what, if anything, you need to do.
• Question a document and ask for quotes so you can check the answers.
• For anything important, read the original parts yourself.

Tomorrow you'll learn why assistants sometimes make things up, and how to check what they tell you.