1.9 – Custom Instruction Ideas For GPTs Lesson

Lesson Overview

This lesson explores a diverse set of prompt instructions you can use in your custom GPTs to achieve precise, focused results. As you’ve learned previously, the instruction box within the GPT builder can hold up to 8,000 characters. However, longer instructions don’t always guarantee better outcomes. In practice, GPT models are most accurate with the content at the beginning and end of the prompt—material in the middle can get less attention.

In business and creative settings, well-chosen instructions can dramatically change the usefulness of a GPT. For example, you might need a GPT that condenses lengthy reports, recommends tools for a new project, or asks clarifying questions when user input is vague. This lesson supplies 25 instruction ideas, each designed to address specific tasks, from summarizing information to providing up-to-date web-based insights.

You’ll learn how to select only the most relevant instructions for a given GPT, because combining too many at once can reduce effectiveness. The included ideas are designed to be copied and pasted, saving you time and helping you avoid creative blocks when building or refining GPTs for entrepreneurship, project management, content creation, and more.

Who This Is For

This lesson is designed for anyone customizing GPTs for focused, practical use:

• Entrepreneurs aiming to streamline business workflows with AI
• Product managers designing AI-powered tools for their teams
• Content creators looking for rapid research, summaries, or brainstorming
• Marketers wanting to automate analysis, recommendations, or reporting
• Educators and trainers who need adaptable, tailored AI assistants
• Anyone feeling stuck or unsure how to guide their custom GPT’s behavior

Where This Fits in a Workflow

You’ll use this lesson’s instruction ideas at the stage where you configure or update your custom GPT’s settings—specifically, in the instructions tab or configuration area. For example:

• Midway through creating a new GPT, you may realize you need it to summarize user input. Copy and paste the summarization instruction directly into the instruction box.
• When adapting a GPT to serve as a project advisor, you could use the “guide project development” or “recommend tools and resources” prompts to tailor outputs.

By integrating targeted instructions during setup or when tweaking your GPT, you improve its day-to-day usefulness for handling documents, answering questions, or generating plans. This lesson ensures that your GPT delivers what you and your users actually need.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Previously, you may have built GPTs by typing instructions from scratch, often juggling long, overlapping prompts. This “manual” approach risks vague or inconsistent results—especially if you include too many goals in one box. The streamlined method shown here uses short, focused, copy-and-paste instructions, making your GPTs easier to update, troubleshoot, and repurpose.

For instance, inserting an instruction like “Summarize lengthy input in three clear bullet points” immediately tunes your GPT for concise output, reducing time spent rewording or clarifying. Or, by adding a single line about asking clarifying questions, your GPT becomes proactively helpful when user requests are unclear.

In client-facing roles or solo work, this strategic use of prompts can improve turnaround time, boost the quality of answers, and prevent common misunderstandings—without the need for technical rewriting or guesswork.

Practice Exercise

1. Try this exercise to apply the lesson concepts:
   
   Open the configure/instructions tab of a custom GPT you’ve set up or are actively developing.
2. Choose three instruction ideas from the lesson’s resource guide (e.g., summarize information, recommend tools and resources, ask clarifying questions). Copy and paste each one into separate positions within the instructions box—beginning, middle, and end.
3. Test your GPT on a typical user request. Does the GPT respond as you expect for each instruction? Which positioning seems to deliver better results?

Reflection: After testing, ask yourself—did summarizing, recommending, or clarifying work as planned, or did any instruction seem to get “lost” in the middle? How might you rearrange or trim your instructions for clarity?

Course Context Recap

This lesson is part of your journey in building highly effective GPTs tailored for entrepreneurial or business scenarios. In previous lessons, you learned about structuring instructions for clarity and brevity. Now, you have a toolkit of practical, pre-written ideas to put those principles into action. Next, the course will guide you through real-world implementations and troubleshooting, so you can continue to evolve your GPTs. To get the most out of this skill, keep exploring and testing different combinations from the instruction set—each new use case may spark a better GPT solution.