First-draft any document from a three-bullet brief

Collapse the blank page from 60 minutes of staring to 10 minutes of editing, for any document you regularly need.

What you'll have when you're done

A working method for turning three bullets into a first draft of any internal document: memos, job posts, one-pagers, policies, proposal outlines. You give the model what it actually needs to know. It gives you a draft worth editing. The blank page goes away.

No terminal. No integrations. Plain chat window, today.

The document sitting in your head

You know the one.

The all-hands memo about the new expense policy that keeps getting deprioritized. The job post for the fractional CFO you need badly but haven't written yet. The one-pager to get leadership aligned on switching your 3PL so you can actually issue the RFQ.

None of these are complicated. You know what each one needs to say. The problem is not knowing; it is starting. A blank document is heavy. So it sits, half-formed, in your head, and you context-switch around it all week.

The three-bullet brief is how you make it stop sitting there.

What you need first

• A Claude or ChatGPT account. Plain chat, free tier works for this.
• One document you have been putting off. Anything from the list below: memo, job post, one-pager, policy, proposal outline.
• Three minutes to write three bullets. That is the whole setup.

If drafting emails is the priority, drafting and rewriting emails in chat is the right sibling piece. This one is for longer internal documents.

Step by step

The three-bullet brief

Before you ask for any draft, write three bullets. These three collapse the output space from thousands of possible documents to one specific thing:

1. What this is. Document type plus topic. "All-hands memo announcing a new expense-approval policy." Not just "a memo about expenses."
2. Who it is for. Audience and their context. "Managers and ICs on a 40-person team who will need to comply without feeling policed."
3. What it must do. The goal or decision it should drive. "Compliance without anxiety. Everyone understands the change; nobody emails HR asking what it means."

Skip any one of these and the model fills the gap with assumptions. The assumptions are where generic output comes from. Audience and purpose are the two highest-leverage inputs: get those right and the model has what it needs to produce something that actually fits.

Three bullets is the floor. A real number, a hard constraint, or a real tension in the situation makes the brief sharper, not longer. "Policy for a 15-person team, no legal hedging, needs to hold up across three time zones" is sharper than a vague two-sentence brief, and it is still only three bullets.

The rule that kills generic writing

Generic in, generic out. Two moves break that loop.

First: give specifics. The actual number, the actual constraint, the actual decision the document needs to drive. "Fractional CFO for a $12M DTC brand" beats "fractional CFO for a fast-growing company." The model cannot invent the specifics it does not have. When you leave them out, it fills in industry-standard boilerplate that fits any company and therefore fits yours poorly.

Second: tell it what to reject. The "what not to do" instruction is as load-bearing as the positive ones. "No corporate boilerplate. No hedging. No throat-clearing introduction. Say the actual thing in sentence one." That knocks out the whole category of output that prompts a second draft. For a job description, add: "Filter out generalists. Do not describe the role in a way that makes everyone think they qualify."

Paste both with your brief: one instruction for what to produce, one for what to avoid.

The five document types

These are the ones that come up repeatedly at the operator level. Each is a different shape and needs slightly different emphasis in your brief.

1. Internal memo or announcement

Brief example: "All-hands memo to a 40-person team announcing a new expense-approval policy. Audience: managers and ICs. Goal: compliance without anxiety. No legal hedging. Say what changed, why, and what anyone needs to do differently by when."

The goal for a memo is clarity, not persuasion. Tell the model that.

2. Job post

Brief example: "Fractional CFO for a $12M DTC brand. Audience: senior finance operators, not generalists. Goal: filter out anyone without FP&A experience at this revenue tier. No fluff about 'fast-paced environments.' List the actual work they will do."

The job description that filters is the intermediate version of this workflow, with more specifics on the screening signal problem.

3. One-pager or brief

Brief example: "One-pager on switching our 3PL. Audience: the leadership team. Goal: greenlight to issue an RFQ. Present the case; do not editorialize. This just needs to open the door."

One-pagers live or die on whether the reader can absorb the argument in one read. Tell the model the reader's time budget.

4. Simple policy or FAQ

Brief example: "Remote-work policy for a 15-person team. Audience: employees. Goal: clear core-hours and reimbursement expectations. No lawyerly hedging. One page, headers and bullets."

For any policy, your first draft is a starting frame. Before it goes anywhere that binds people or creates legal exposure, a qualified human reviews it. That note belongs in your process, not in the document itself.

5. Proposal outline

Brief example: "Outline for a partnership proposal to a mid-market SaaS vendor. Audience: their VP Partnerships. Goal: a 30-minute exploratory call, not a commitment. Lead with what we bring; do not lead with what we want from them."

An outline first is faster than a full draft first. Let the model generate the structure, confirm the sections are right, then fill in or ask it to expand. For team and investor updates, the workflow has more specifics; those documents have their own shape and rhythm.

How to iterate from the first draft

The first draft is not the final draft. It is the starting frame. The blank page is gone; now you are editing, and editing is faster than writing.

The three moves you will use most: "Tighten to half the length." "Lead with the decision, not the background." "Make it more direct and less formal."

If a section is missing: "Add a short FAQ at the bottom covering the three most common objections."

If the voice is off, paste a paragraph you already wrote and say: "Match this voice." Follow-up prompting covers the full method here: four moves, each named, each fast. Stay in the thread. Do not start over.

If you run the same brief repeatedly for the same role or situation, save it. Claude Projects holds the brief and your style guidance at the top of every conversation so you never re-type the setup.

How you'll know it's working

The first draft needs editing, not rewriting. If you are rewriting more than 30-40% of the output, the brief is the problem. Either you left out the real constraint or you did not tell the model what to reject. Tighten the brief; try again.

The document stops sitting in your head. Not because you cleared your schedule, but because three bullets and ninety seconds gets you 80% of the way there.

People stop asking clarifying questions after they read it. That is the memo or one-pager doing its job. Clear documents close the follow-up loop that unfocused ones open.

When it breaks

The output is right in structure but wrong in specifics. This means the model supplied details you did not give it. Dates you did not specify. Numbers it invented. Context it inferred. Verify every fact and number the model added. Facts you gave it are safe. Facts it supplied are suspects. Read the draft once for things you did not put in the brief, and check each one before the document goes anywhere.

The draft sounds like a template, not a document. That is generic in, generic out. Reread your brief. Did you put in the real number? The actual constraint? Or did you describe the document in a way that fits any company? Add specifics and re-run.

The tone is wrong for the audience. Add context about who is reading and how they will receive it. "This goes to employees who have heard mixed signals for two months. Start with what is not changing." The model does not know your company history unless you tell it.

High-stakes or regulated documents need a human in the loop. Employment agreements, financial disclosures, compliance policies: use this workflow to produce a starting frame. Then a qualified person, often a lawyer, reviews before it goes anywhere. The draft gets you 80% of the way faster. The last 20% is yours.

Level up

Once this is a reflex, the next layer is giving the model better context before it writes. The three-bullet brief tells it the document; giving AI the right context tells it your business, your audience, and your constraints in a way that tightens every output across every conversation.

The sequence: context first, brief second, first draft third, follow-up steering fourth. Each layer makes the next one cheaper. The blank page is the first thing to eliminate.