AI Shortcuts: How I Supercharged ChatGPT with One-Letter Shortcuts

The Productivity Problem with AI Assistants

If you're like me, you use ChatGPT constantly—rewriting text, translating, summarizing, or cleaning up grammar. As a digital nomad and developer, I rely on it daily to polish my writing and communicate across languages. But typing out the same requests over and over? That gets old fast.

After the hundredth time asking "Can you rewrite this to sound more professional?" or "Please summarize this paragraph," I realized I was wasting precious time repeating myself.

So I asked myself:

• What if ChatGPT worked more like a command line?
• What if I could trigger complex actions with just a letter?
• What if I could build a system that remembers my common requests?

Introducing: Shortcut Commands for ChatGPT

I created a lightweight system of single-letter shortcuts that I now use daily prefixed with "-". It lets me speed up my workflow dramatically by writing just one character and letting ChatGPT do the rest. The time savings add up quickly—I estimate I save 15-20 minutes every day on repetitive prompting.

Example Usage

I've been using this system for months now, and it's become an essential part of my workflow:

• 💬 Writing emails: -r Can you make this email more professional while keeping it friendly?
• 🌍 Translating marketing copy: -t Aquí tienes un texto que quiero en inglés para mi sitio web:
• 📚 Summarizing meeting notes: Just reply with -i after pasting lengthy notes
• ✍️ Generating copy to fit a layout: --100 Rewrite this to fit in a 100-character space for a button.
• 📱 Social media posts: -+280 Expand this idea into a Twitter thread

The system is particularly valuable when I'm working across multiple languages. As someone who frequently switches between English and Spanish, the -t command has saved me countless trips to translation tools.

Prefix Commands

These commands are used at the beginning of a message, followed by the text you want to process:

• r → Rewrite the text for better style and clarity
• t → Translate between English and Spanish
• q → Correct grammar and spelling without changing meaning
• x → Extract key points or create bullet summaries
• =5 → Give me five different options
• +600 → Expand the text to about 600 characters
• -200 → Shorten the text to around 200 characters

Standalone Commands

These commands can be sent as standalone responses, making them even faster to use:

• i → Summarize the previous message into key points
• e → Explain the previous message in simpler terms
• a → Give a quick answer to the last question
• h → Show the list of all available commands
• d → Provide more details about the previous response

Why It Works So Well

ChatGPT remembers context in a conversation. That means you can tell it once how to interpret these letters, and then just use them naturally without explaining yourself every time.

The beauty of this approach is in its simplicity. By leveraging ChatGPT's context window, you're essentially creating a custom interface that persists throughout your conversation. It's like creating your own mini operating system inside a chat.

The technical reason this works is that the initial prompt becomes part of the conversation's context, which ChatGPT references when interpreting subsequent messages. This context window typically holds several thousand tokens, easily accommodating your custom command system.

The Setup Prompt

Here's the exact setup prompt I gave ChatGPT at the start of our conversation:

From now on, interpret single-character or single-letter commands to perform common operations. Some will be used as **prefixes** (at the start of a message), and others as **standalone triggers**. They are going to be prefaced with a "-" (a slash) Here's the full list:

**Prefix Commands (when used at the beginning of a message):**
r → Rewrite the text to improve style, clarity, and fluency.
t → Translate the text into English or Spanish based on its original language.
q → Correct grammar and spelling mistakes.
x → Extract key takeaways or bullet points.
=[number] → Give me as a new response that number of alternatives.
+[number] → Expand the text to approximately that number of characters.
-[number] → Shorten the text to approximately that number of characters.

**Standalone Commands (when the letter is sent alone):**
i → Summarize the last message into key ideas.
e → Explain the previous message in simple terms.
h → Help: list all available commands.

If I write something that doesn't match a valid shortcut, treat it as a normal message or let me know it's not recognized.

**Examples:**
`-r This text could sound more polished.` → Rewrite it.
`-+600 Here’s a short paragraph I want to expand.` → Expand to ~600 characters.
`--200 This is a long paragraph that should be shortened.` → Shorten to ~200 characters.
Just sending `-i` → Summarize the last response.

Customizing for Your Needs

The beauty of this system is how easily you can customize it. Consider what tasks you perform repeatedly with ChatGPT and assign them single-letter shortcuts. Some ideas:

• f → Format text as a formal document
• b → Brainstorm ideas related to the topic
• p → Convert text into a persuasive argument
• m → Create a mind map of the concepts

Remember that the commands should be intuitive for you—there's no "right" way to set them up as long as they boost your productivity.

Want to Try It?

If you want to experiment with this system, you can:

• Copy the setup prompt above and paste it into your Customize ChatGPT Options (this is the one I recommend)
• Save it as a Custom GPT so it remembers the rules between sessions
• Create a new ChatGPT project and add the instructions there

One letter, one action. That's how I've made ChatGPT part of my creative flow—turning a powerful but sometimes verbose tool into a lightning-fast extension of my thinking process.

What shortcuts would you add to make your AI interactions more efficient?