PREP: how to answer anything in under a minute
By Rita Okonkwo · The Craft
Somebody asks you a question you did not prepare for. In a meeting, in an interview, at the end of your own talk. Most people answer by thinking out loud: they start with background, circle toward an opinion, and trail off when they notice nobody is sure what the point was.
PREP is the fix for that. It is four parts in a fixed order, Point, Reason, Example, Point, and it fits inside a minute. You say what you think, you say why, you show it, and you say what you think again.
PREP, one part at a time
Question: Should teams keep one day a week free of meetings?
- Point (Say your main claim): I think every team should keep one day a week free of meetings.
- Reason (Why it's true): Deep work needs long, unbroken stretches of time, and a calendar full of half-hour slots never leaves one.
- Example (A real story or fact): When my team tried no-meeting Wednesdays last spring, we shipped a release we had been pushing back for two months, in three weeks.
- Point (Say it again, and stop): So yes: one day a week, no meetings, and guard it.
The four parts
1. Point: say your main claim
Open with the answer, in one sentence. Not the context, not "that's a great question", not the history of the problem. The listener should know where you stand before they know anything else.
A good Point is short enough to repeat. If it needs a comma and a "but", it is two points, and you only have time for one.
2. Reason: why it's true
One reason, the strongest you have. Three reasons feel thorough while you are speaking and sound like a list while you are listening. If you genuinely have three, that is a different structure, the Rule of Three.
3. Example: a real story or fact
The Reason is a claim about the world. The Example is what makes somebody believe it. A specific moment ("last spring, my team...") or a specific number does that job. A general statement ("in my experience it usually works") does not: it is the Reason again, in different words.
This is usually the longest part, and it should be.
4. Point: say it again, and stop
Restate your opening Point, ideally in slightly different words, and then stop talking. The second Point is what tells the listener you have finished, and it is the sentence they are most likely to remember.
Why the Point comes twice
Repeating yourself feels wasteful when you are the one speaking. It is not wasteful for the listener. They heard your first Point before they had any reason to care about it; by the time they hear the second, they have the reason and the example behind it. It is the same sentence landing on a different person.
It also solves the hardest part of answering off the cuff, which is ending. Without a planned last line, people keep adding ("and another thing...", "so, yeah...") until the silence gets awkward. With PREP you always know your last line before you start: it is your first one.
An answer, taken apart
Here is the answer from the figure again, with its parts labelled:
Point. I think every team should keep one day a week free of meetings.
Reason. Deep work needs long, unbroken stretches of time, and a calendar full of half-hour slots never leaves one.
Example. When my team tried no-meeting Wednesdays last spring, we shipped a release we had been pushing back for two months, in three weeks.
Point. So yes: one day a week, no meetings, and guard it.
Four sentences, about thirty seconds out loud. Notice what is not there: no preamble, no second reason, no hedge at the end.
Where it works, and where it doesn't
PREP is at its best when somebody asks for your view and you have about a minute: an interview question, a status update, a "what do you think?" in a meeting, a question from the floor after a talk.
It is the wrong tool when the story itself is the point, when you are delivering bad news that needs its context before its conclusion, or when you have much longer than a couple of minutes. A ten-minute talk can be built out of several PREPs, but one PREP stretched to ten minutes turns into a single, very long Example.
How the Coach listens for it
When you practise with PREP in the Coach, your recording is checked part by part: did you open with a Point, give a Reason, back it with an Example, and come back to the Point? The report tells you which parts landed and which were missing, so "structure" stops being a vague score and becomes one specific part to fix on the next take.
Practise it
The fastest way to make PREP automatic is to use it on questions you have not seen. Practise PREP in the Coach: the technique stays locked, and every spin hands you a new question to answer with it.