10 min read

Summarizing Long Documents

Turn 20 pages into 20 seconds

One of AI's superpowers is condensing large amounts of text into exactly what you need. Meeting notes, reports, articles, research papers — AI can extract the key points in seconds.

The summarization framework

When asking AI to summarize, specify three things:

What to summarize — paste the text or describe the document

What to focus on — "Focus on action items," "Focus on financial impacts," "Focus on decisions made"

What format — "5 bullet points," "One paragraph," "A table with columns for Decision, Owner, and Deadline"

Example prompts for different situations

Meeting notes: "Summarize these meeting notes into action items. For each item, include who's responsible and the deadline. Format as a numbered list."

Long report: "Summarize this report in 3 paragraphs: one for key findings, one for recommendations, and one for risks or concerns."

Email thread: "Read this email chain and give me a 3-sentence summary of the current situation and what decision needs to be made."

Pro tip: For very long documents, break them into sections and summarize each one. Then ask AI to create an overall summary from the section summaries. This produces much better results than dumping the entire text at once.

Quick Check

When asking AI to summarize a long report, which additional instruction will give you the MOST useful output?