Write Down How It Actually Works

What this is for

There is a job in your business that only works when you do it. Not because it is hard, but because it has forty small decisions in it and every one of them lives in your head. Somebody asked you to write it down once. You started, got three steps in, hit a place where the honest answer was "it depends", and closed the document.

This is for finishing it. You talk through the job out loud for ten minutes, and AI turns the recording into a written procedure. The part that makes it work: instead of inventing clean rules for the "it depends" moments, the prompts are built to flag them and hand them back to you as questions.

You will not get a finished manual in one sitting. You will get a draft that is eighty percent right and a short list of the decisions that are genuinely yours, which is the thing that has been stopping you.

Before you start

• Pick the job that breaks most often when you are not there. Not the biggest job, the one that goes wrong. If you are not sure, the job you get called about while you are away is the answer.
• Ten minutes and somewhere you can talk out loud. Your car counts.
• A way to record and transcribe. Your phone's voice memo app plus a transcription tool, or dictation straight into a chat app. The Meeting-to-Memo guide covers the transcript tools if you do not have one.

One thing to get right before you start talking: describe what you actually do, not what you would tell an inspector you do. The exceptions are the valuable part. A procedure that omits the way you really handle the awkward customer is a procedure nobody will follow, because everyone can see it does not match the business.

The ten minutes

Do not plan this. Planning turns it into the same document you already failed to write. Talk through the job start to finish as if explaining it to a competent new hire sitting next to you, and let it be messy.

Five things to cover, in whatever order they come out:

1. What starts it. The phone call, the form, the date on the calendar, the thing somebody notices.
2. What you do, in order. Say the obvious steps out loud even though they are obvious. The obvious ones are where new people get stuck.
3. Where you check something. Any point you look at a screen, a file, a price list, or a past job before continuing.
4. Where it goes wrong, and what you do then. Say "usually" and "unless" as much as you need to. This is the part most worth recording.
5. How you know it is finished. What tells you the job is actually done rather than nearly done.

If you dry up, describe the last real time you did this job, by name and date. Recalling one specific instance produces far more usable detail than trying to describe the general case.

The prompts

Prompt 1: Turn the transcript into a draft procedure

Use either ChatGPT or Claude. Replace customer and supplier names with roles before pasting. A procedure often carries your pricing rules and supplier terms, which is exactly the material The One-Page AI Policy says belongs in a business-tier account rather than a personal one. Either keep the numbers out of the recording or use an account that is contractually confirmed not to train on your data.

ROLE: You are documenting a working procedure inside a small business
by listening to the owner describe it. You write down what they
actually do. You never improve it, standardize it, or fill gaps with
what businesses usually do.

CONTEXT: I run [WHAT YOUR BUSINESS DOES]. Below is a transcript of me
talking through one recurring job. It is unstructured and I repeat
myself.

TRANSCRIPT: [PASTE]

CONSTRAINTS:
- Use only what is in the transcript. Invent nothing. If a step is
  implied but never stated, list it as a question instead of a step.
- Where I said "usually", "normally", "it depends", "unless" or
  trailed off, do not resolve it into a rule. Capture it as an open
  decision in my own words.
- Keep my vocabulary. If I call it a "job sheet", it is a job sheet,
  not a "work order".
- Do not add quality checks, compliance steps or best practices that
  I did not describe.
- Do not recommend software.

OUTPUT FORMAT:
1. "What starts this job" in one sentence.
2. "The steps" as a numbered list, one action each, naming who does
   it where I said so.
3. "Where it goes wrong" as a bulleted list of the exceptions I
   described and what I said I do about each.
4. "Decisions still only in your head" as a numbered list of every
   point where I said it depends or did not finish the thought,
   phrased as a question back to me.
5. "What I could not tell from the transcript" as a short list.

Prompt 2: Answer the open decisions

Work through the "Decisions still only in your head" list that Prompt 1 returned. For each one, say the rule out loud and record that too, then run this.

ROLE: Same documenter. You are folding my answers back into the
procedure.

CONTEXT: You listed the decisions that were still only in my head.
Below are my answers to them, again as unstructured talking.

MY ANSWERS: [PASTE]

CONSTRAINTS:
- Fold each answer into the procedure at the point it belongs, as an
  "if this, then that" line in my words.
- If my answer is still conditional, leave it conditional. Some
  decisions genuinely have no rule, and writing a false rule is worse
  than writing none.
- Flag separately any answer that reveals a step missing from the
  original list.
- Do not smooth the language into corporate procedure voice.

OUTPUT FORMAT: The full revised procedure, then a short section
titled "Still yours" listing the decisions that remain judgment calls
with no rule, and one line each on why.

Prompt 3: Test it against a new person

ROLE: You are a capable new employee on your first week. You have
never done this job and you know nothing about this business beyond
the document below.

CONTEXT: [PASTE THE REVISED PROCEDURE]

CONSTRAINTS: Read it as someone who will be blamed if they get it
wrong. Do not be polite or encouraging. List every point where you
would have to stop and ask somebody, and say exactly what you would
ask. Where a step uses a word that assumes knowledge of this
business, name the word.

OUTPUT FORMAT: A numbered list of the questions you would have to
ask, in the order you would hit them. Then one sentence naming the
single step most likely to be done wrong by someone following this
literally.

Prompt 3 is the one that earns the afternoon. A procedure always reads as complete to the person who wrote it, because they fill the gaps without noticing.

What you now have

Three things, and they are worth different amounts.

The procedure is useful and slightly disappointing. It is a document, it is roughly right, and somebody else can follow most of it. That is a real gain and it is not the main prize.

The "Still yours" list is the main prize. Those are the decisions that actually require you, now written down as decisions rather than hiding inside a job nobody else can do. Most owners find this list is far shorter than they expected. The job felt undelegatable; it turns out four specific judgment calls were undelegatable and the other thirty-six steps were just undocumented.

The questions from Prompt 3 are your training plan. Whoever next does this job will ask those questions. You now know them in advance.

One honest note on the effort. Doing this for one job takes an afternoon. Doing it for every job in your business takes considerably longer than you want to spend, and that is worth knowing before you start rather than after. Do the one job that breaks most often. If nothing else ever gets written down, that one still pays for itself the first time you are away and nobody calls.

Where this goes wrong

• You write instead of talking. Writing makes you tidy the job up as you go, and the tidy version is not the one that runs. Talk first, always.
• You let the AI resolve an "it depends". The model will happily invent a clean threshold. If you accept one you did not actually choose, you have documented a business you do not run.
• You describe the job as it should be done. Then the document contradicts what everyone can see happening, and it gets ignored within two weeks.
• You pick the most important job rather than the most broken one. The important job usually has your full attention already. The broken one is where the money leaks.
• You stop after Prompt 1. The first draft reads well enough that finishing feels optional. The open decisions are the entire reason this was hard, and they are still unanswered at that point.

The 2-minute version

Pick the job that goes wrong when you are away. Talk through it for ten minutes: what starts it, what you do, where you check something, where it goes wrong, how you know it is done. Transcribe it. Run Prompt 1 and pay attention only to the list of decisions still in your head. Answer those out loud, run Prompt 2, then run Prompt 3 to find the questions a new person would have to ask. Keep the "Still yours" list where you can see it.

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More where this came from. The resource library has 23 free guides like this one, written for people with real careers rather than developers.

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