Your work. Your checkpoints.
A plan keeps you in charge.
A plan is a step-by-step runbook for an AI agent: what to do, what to use, when to stop for your review, and what counts as finished.
Build your plan →Why not one big prompt?
A single request can leave you checking a pile of finished work with little visibility into how it got there. A plan breaks that work into small results you can inspect. Catch a missing input or wrong assumption before it carries into the next step.
For example, instead of “write our customer follow-ups,” ask the agent to identify the customers first, pause for your review, draft the messages, then pause again. You can correct the customer list before any messages are drafted.
Five parts of a useful plan
- Goal: name the result. “Draft follow-up emails for the five leads I select.”
- Inputs: name the material it may use. “The lead notes I paste in and our approved product summary.”
- Steps: break the work into a sensible sequence. Check the notes, confirm the list, then write drafts.
- Review gates: say what you must check before it continues. Confirm the recipients, then check each draft’s facts and tone.
- Done when: make completion observable. “Five approved drafts, with missing details flagged and nothing sent.”
Add rules too: what must it never do? For this example: do not invent prices, contact customers, or change the source records.
The loop: do, review, approve, repeat
- The agent does one step and shows its result.
- It stops at the review gate and explains what you need to check.
- You approve that step or ask for changes. Silence is not approval.
- If you ask for changes, it revises that step and stops again. Once you approve, it starts the next step.
- It repeats until the work meets your “done when” criteria and you approve the final result.
A plan is an instruction, not a lock
Paste the plan into your chosen assistant and provide the inputs it needs. Check that it actually pauses. The builder creates text; it does not connect to your tools or run the work.
For an automated workflow, configure actual pause and approval controls before allowing actions such as sending messages or updating records. A prompt alone cannot enforce those controls.
Start with a small draft-only task so you can check the loop before using it on everyday work.
Build a plan with review gates →Still defining the work? Start with the one-page workflow brief.