Thursday, September 10th, 2026
Happy Thursday!
Welcome back to HOW TO // AI. Quick question: how many meetings on your calendar this week actually needed to happen? Don't answer. Instead, let me show you the 30-second habit that changed how I walk into every single one of them.
Here's what's in today's issue:
🤝 The Prompt I Run Before Every Meeting (steal it, it's printed in full)
🎯 Free Download: The Meeting Kit (all 3 meeting prompts)
📝 I took my own cert quiz cold. It did not go great.
🎯 Grab today's free download first: The Meeting Kit (free Notion page) - the before-meeting prompt, the standing-meeting variant, and the follow-up closer. Copy-paste ready.
Let's get into it!
🤝 The prompt I run before every meeting
Some meetings are worth an hour. Most are worth the eight minutes it takes to make one decision - the trick is knowing which decision before you walk in.
So before every meeting on my calendar, I paste the invite into AI with this prompt. Thirty seconds. It has saved me more hours this year than anything else I do with AI.
Here's a meeting I'm about to walk into: [paste the invite - title, attendees, agenda, any email thread]
Give me, in under 200 words total:
1. The ONE decision this meeting actually exists to make.
2. My three best questions, ranked - the ones that move that decision.
3. What each attendee probably wants out of this, based on their role.
4. The trap - where this meeting will waste its time, and the one sentence I can use to steer it back.
5. My 30-second opener.Why it works: most meetings drift because nobody named the decision. When you walk in already knowing it - plus the question that unlocks it - you're the most prepared person in the room. Nobody can tell the difference between that and the smartest.
The part people skip: number 4, the trap. Every recurring meeting has one - the tangent it always dies in. Having the redirect sentence ready is worth more than the agenda.
The follow-up move: when the meeting ends, paste your rough notes back into the same chat: "Draft the follow-up email - decisions, owners, deadlines, under 150 words." The person who sends the follow-up first owns the meeting's memory. That's now always you. (That prompt is in the Kit too.)
📝 I took my own cert quiz cold. It did not go great.
I'm finally sitting an AI certification: the AWS AI Practitioner ($100, no code required, the most-recognized entry AI cert there is). Not the Claude certs everyone keeps asking about - most of us literally can't take those.
Before opening a single study page, I tested myself cold on my own practice set. The quick five: 5/5. Felt smart. Then the full set: 5 out of 15.
That gap - between feeling ready and being ready - is exactly how this exam gets people to pay $100 twice.
👉 Take the free set yourself → no signup, 2 minutes. Beat my 5/15 and you're ahead of the guy who built the question bank. Score under 10? Here's the 3-week plan I'm following - and if you pass before Sept 30, AWS currently throws in a second exam free.
🎯 Free download: The Meeting Kit
All three meeting prompts - the before-meeting prep, the standing-meeting variant, and the follow-up closer - full length, copy-ready, in a single Notion page you can keep on your phone. Works with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or whatever you use. Free, as always.
🧰 Two things I made, in case you're new here
A lot of you joined in the last few weeks, so here's the short tour of the shelf:
📕 Amplified is my book on getting real work out of AI without becoming a prompt engineer. Everything in this newsletter grew out of it. Get the book →
🤖 HOW TO // AI - CERT is practice exams and an AI tutor for 11 AI certifications: AWS, Azure, Google, NVIDIA and more. 3,301 original questions, timed mocks, plain-English explanations. On the web and on your iPhone. Free to start. Take a free practice exam → · Get the iPhone app →
🎁 Share this newsletter, unlock every kit I've made
Forward this to one coworker who's drowning in meetings - you're a third of the way to the first reward:
🎁 3 referrals → you unlock the Complete Kit Vault: every kit I've ever made (including today's Meeting Kit), in one organized hub, with every future kit added automatically.
📕 10 referrals → I send you my book, Amplified, in PDF and EPUB. The whole thing. Free.
Your unique link and progress tracker are right here:
🎯 Try this today: open tomorrow's worst-looking calendar invite. Run the Meeting Prompt on it. Walk in knowing the decision. Then hit reply and tell me what "the trap" turned out to be - I read every email, and yes, I reply to all of them myself.
📬 In case you missed our last few issues
The 3 prompts I actually reuse
The editor, the extractor, and the explainer - long on purpose, plus the free Paste-In Prompt Pack.
Pass your AI cert. First try.
3,301 practice questions. 11 AI certs. An AI tutor. On your phone, free to start.
I quit doing these 3 things
I handed them to AI completely. The exact prompts, plus a free AI Delegation Kit.
🤔 Got questions?
Have a question you want answered? What's the meeting on your calendar you'd delete forever if you could? Email [email protected] and you just might be featured in an upcoming issue!
This newsletter is your starter kit for mastering AI with confidence. We keep things simple, show real examples, and focus on quick wins you can repeat.
Stay curious, stick with it, and watch your skills grow week by week!
Until next time :)
-David
P.S. If your day job is enterprise IT - VMware, cloud, storage, infrastructure - I write a second newsletter that decodes that world in ten minutes a week: Enterprise Techie →
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