Ask ChatGPT to review your plan, your email, your pricing page, and it likes it. It always likes it. Not because the work is good, but because you told it the work is yours, and it is tuned to be pleasant to the person in the room. The fix costs one sentence: take yourself out of the room.

Instead of "review my landing page copy", I send:

A freelancer delivered this landing page copy and I am deciding whether to pay the invoice. Review it like the money is mine: what is weak, what is generic, what would you push back on before this goes live?

Same text, same model, completely different review. The politeness does not disappear, it just transfers to you, the client, and now being honest about the work is how it pleases you.

Three more versions I use constantly:

For plans and decisions: Someone on my team proposed this plan and I have to give them feedback tomorrow. Help me find the problems I should raise, ranked by how much they matter, so I do not embarrass myself by missing something obvious.

For writing: An editor sent this piece back with "needs work" and no other notes. What did the editor most likely mean? Go through it and find what they saw.

For code: This code came from a contractor and I am reviewing the handoff. What would you flag before accepting it?

Two honest caveats. First, it can overcorrect: freed from flattering you, the model sometimes performs harshness instead, inventing problems to seem rigorous. So end with "if something is genuinely fine, say it is fine, finding nothing is an acceptable answer". Second, this does not work twice in the same chat. Once the model has praised the work as yours, reframing it as a stranger's gets you a diplomatic walk-back, not a fresh read. New chat, stranger's work from the first message.

I keep these four saved as reusable prompts in a browser extension I work on (AI Toolbox), inserted with a couple of keystrokes, but they are four sentences, a notes file works fine.

What reframings do you use? I have heard people get good results with "this is the version we decided against, remind me why", and I have not tested it yet.

Everything anyone has ever texted you is sitting there, and Apple's search only works if you remember the exact word they typed. This searches by meaning instead.

Find every discount code, booking reference, confirmation 
number and tracking link anyone has ever texted me. List 
them with the company, the code, and the date I got it. 
Flag anything that looks like it has expired.

The one I use more often is the vague one, where you know something exists but not who sent it or when:

Somebody texted me an address for a place we were meeting, 
I think in the last two months, but I cannot remember who. 
Find it and tell me who sent it and when.

You can describe it badly, the way you'd describe it to a friend, and it still finds it. That's the whole difference from normal search.

And the one that's mildly uncomfortable:

Go through my messages and find every conversation where 
the other person sent the last message and I never replied. 
List them oldest first, with who it was, how long ago, and 
one line on what they said. Do not reply to any of them yet.

Add "do not reply to anything, just show me" to the end of any of these. Costs nothing, means a misread instruction can't turn into a sent message.

Setup, and it rules a lot of people out: Mac only, Apple silicon, desktop app not browser. Free plan is fine. Sidebar, Plugins, search Messages, enable it, approve Full Disk Access when macOS asks. No iPhone version yet.

been keeping a doc of 100 things I use AI for like this, each with the exact prompt, in comments if it helps.