Important Information Only (IIO)
IIO or important information only (Another acronym I just created) is something I can't get enough of.
Have you ever found an article that had a compelling title? Then you get there and it's a huge article. You think, there must be some good stuff in here. Then you discover it has one line of useful information.
I had this happen to me like yesterday. Since I run a website I'm always looking for ways to promote it or optimize it for search engines, etc. Anyway, I was browsing on Medium and I came across an article (I won't call it out) about how he transformed his blog and moved past SEO. I was curious of course. How do you grow your blog without SEO? It was like 3,000 words. Super long. I got about 1,000 words in and I was like "Okay, I had enough. I'm done milking this article (or getting milked because I wasn't getting anything valuable)" Anyway, I passed the article to Copilot and it summed up the article in 3 words: pay for ads...
I was shook to my core.
Anyway, here are some good ways to ask Copilot to get the important information out of an article:
- Summarize the main points of this article for me: URL
- What are the key takeaways from URL?
- What tasks or actions are suggested in this article?
- Can you give me a list of the important information and action items from URL?
I find myself using the "What tasks or actions are suggested in this article?" a lot because a lot of my reading has to do with improving the security of a Microsoft 365 tenant or improving my website but you might read different stuff and prefer the summary. I don't know. There's more than one way to skin a cat. Which is a terrible way to say "There's multiple ways of doing something" Why not there's more than one way to walk down the street? Or There's more than one way to milk a cow? I mean, there are multiple ways to do just about everything so why skin a cat?
Anyway, I digress.