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A few days ago, during the New Year, something big happened internationally.
That is, China quietly launched an AI model called DeepSeek, which instantly amazed the world!
It feels like everyone in the United States, from the president to the common people, is discussing DeepSeek.
This article provides you with effective usage tips for DeepSeek, completely freeing you from prompt anxiety and making AI truly your “strongest brain”!
Source | AI Application Officer Written by丨Yuan Qingsong
Actually, DeepSeek is a large model similar to OpenAI, and OpenAI is the company that created ChatGPT. People can use it to ask questions, have free conversations with robots, and get help with tasks.
In the past, whenever I had a question, I could ask ChatGPT, and it would give me an answer directly.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to recommend a few animated movies, and it immediately gave me results.
And DeepSeek can achieve similar effects to ChatGPT. For instance, when I posed the same question to DeepSeek, it also gave me an answer immediately.
However, when it comes to recommending animated movies, the recommendations from DeepSeek and ChatGPT are quite different.
From my perspective, I prefer the recommendations from DeepSeek!
Completely Abandon Prompt Templates
Many people use DeepSeek and feel that they need to write in a more “professional” way, fearing that AI won’t understand what they want. As a result, their prompts end up being half a page long, thinking they need to “train” the AI.
But actually, DeepSeek doesn’t need that at all; it’s much smarter than you think and doesn’t require you to teach it how to behave with “tricks”. The truly effective prompt follows one principle:Use human language!
The simplest universal formula — Who you are + Background + Your goal, just state your needs directly, and DeepSeek can give you the most accurate answer.
Let’s look at a negative example: ❌ “You are an expert in psychology. Please analyze a young person’s psychological motivation for choosing to work in a big city based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, using professional terminology.”
It’s too verbose; the AI can certainly respond, but it will regurgitate textbook-like nonsense.
Correct approach: ✅ “I am 25 years old, working in Beijing, but I feel a lot of pressure and want to return home, yet I’m also a bit reluctant. Can you help me analyze if this is a normal psychological state?”
Your feelings are very normal; many young people struggling in big cities experience similar conflicting emotions. We can analyze it from the following angles:
1. Analysis of Sources of Stress
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Adjustment Period to Environment: At 25, you might be in the workplace adjustment phase. The fast-paced, highly competitive environment of Beijing and the challenges of independent living can easily lead to stress.
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Survival Cost Anxiety: The ratio of rent to income, commuting time, social costs, and other real pressures may be depleting your mental energy.
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Value Recognition Crisis: The conflict between the societal view that “staying in a big city equals success” and your true internal needs.
2. The Essence of Conflicted Emotions
This entanglement reflects three major life issues commonly faced by modern young people:
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Self-Actualization Needs (career development space, resource acquisition)
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Quality of Life Needs (work-life balance, living comfort)
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Emotional Belonging Needs (family companionship, familiar social relationships)
3. Key Questions to Consider
It’s suggested to guide self-dialogue with specific questions:
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Career Dimension: Does my current job have sustainable growth potential? Is there a development environment for my industry back home?
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Life Dimension: List specific sources of stress in Beijing (like commuting 3 hours/day) and assess which are improvable.
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Emotional Dimension: Try to have in-depth conversations with friends and family back home to understand the real living conditions rather than imagining them.
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Economic Dimension: Create a 3-year income and expenditure comparison model, including salary growth curves and housing purchase possibilities.
4. Exploration of Middle Ground
There’s no need to choose between “completely staying” and “fully returning”:
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Try setting phased goals (like sticking it out for another year to achieve a career milestone).
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Consider the “satellite city strategy” (looking for compromise solutions around Beijing).
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Explore remote work possibilities.
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Establish a transitional savings plan (like saving enough for a buffer fund).
So, stop fussing over “high-end prompts.” What DeepSeek needs is not a complex framework, but your direct and clear demands!
AI Becomes a Caring Explainer in Seconds
Many people complain that DeepSeek’s responses are too academic. They just want to ask a simple question, yet the AI ends up producing a thesis that gives them a headache. But the issue isn’t that the AI is too aloof; it’s that you didn’t tell it to “speak human language”!
The secret is simple:Lower your status and let the AI relax. Just start with “I am a primary school student”, or be more specific, like“Please explain in layman’s terms,” and the AI’s output will become much more relatable.
Here’s a bad example: ❌ “Please explain the working principle of blockchain.”DeepSeek might give you a professional explanation of the “decentralized distributed ledger consensus mechanism,” which sounds exhausting.
Correct approach: ✅ “I am a complete novice in blockchain; can you explain it to me using the simplest analogy?”At this point, the AI’s response will be: “Blockchain is like a public notebook that everyone can see, and no one can change.” You’ll understand it right away, right?
Of course! Imagine that blockchain is like a “public digital ledger,” but it’s not held by a specific company or bank; instead, it’s broken into countless pieces and distributed across thousands of computers worldwide. Each page of this ledger records various transaction information (like transfers, contracts, game item transactions, etc.), and these pages have a magical feature:
Advanced Techniques: If the AI still isn’t simple enough, you can add “Please illustrate with examples from everyday life,” or “Please explain in points, with each point no more than 20 words,” and the results will be even better!
👇Practical Application Scenario: For example, when mom transfers you 100 yuan as pocket money, this record will be encrypted and entered into the family’s ledger. If your sister tries to secretly change her “100” to “200” in her ledger, but the other three people’s ledgers show 100, her modification will be rejected ❌ — this is why cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can enable “direct transactions between strangers without the need for bank guarantees”!
Chinese Writing Skills Beyond Imagination
DeepSeek’s Chinese writing skills might be more powerful than you imagine! Whether it’s emotional and dramatic, sharp and satirical, or knowledge output like a Zhihu influencer, it can handle all of it. The key is, you have to tell it how to write!
Many people are still stuck in the most basic usage: ❌ “Write a short essay about love.” DeepSeek will give you a standard article that’s fine but lacks soul.
The floor-to-ceiling window in the café is fogged up. I trace two parallel lines with my index finger. The girl next to me, with her latte casting warm spots on the table, flips through the pages of her book with a rhythm like some kind of code. This is probably the initial form of love — two quantum particles that have never met, entangled in an uncertain space-time.
At three in the morning, the bright white light of the convenience store downstairs is always on. The girl in the deep blue uniform holds “A Brief History of Time” while the mint candies in the glass jar at the cash register gradually dissolve into translucent crystals. Perhaps every soul carries a unique spectrum, searching for a frequency that resonates among the vast sea of people, like migratory birds following the geomagnetic field to complete their migration.
The old noodle shop I often visit has a deaf-mute couple. When the man kneads the dough, fine beads of sweat form on his neck, and the woman always wipes her fingers on her apron before helping him. In the flour raised by the trembling cutting board, they argue about how many grams of alkali to add in sign language, and when their gazes meet, they both laugh, creating wrinkles.
It turns out that love is the most precise thermodynamic system, maintaining eternal thermal equilibrium through countless trivial moments.
Spring thunderstorms always arrive punctually at dusk. In the sound of raindrops hitting the awning, I suddenly understand those physical metaphors: Tides are letters written by the moon to the ocean, and photosynthesis is a long kiss between light and chloroplasts. And humanity has evolved a nervous system over hundreds of thousands of years, just to allow two charged neurons to burst forth fireworks bright enough to illuminate the entire cerebral cortex when they meet.
✅ “Using Wang Xiaobo’s humorous style, write a story about a socially anxious boy secretly loving his goddess.” As a result, when DeepSeek takes action, you’ll start to doubt if Wang Xiaobo has traveled through time.
When I observed that girl in the white dress for the third time in the library, I finally confirmed that she wasn’t a figment of my imagination. This story begins with quantum mechanics — when you dare not look directly at an existence, the best method of observation is to use your peripheral vision for quantum tunneling. My peripheral vision sweeps across her little pinky finger when she flips through her book, as cautious as measuring an electron’s position.
That day on the cafeteria steps, the Newtonian pendulum of fate finally struck the back of my head. She was carrying a tomato and egg soup while I rushed down with sweet and sour ribs. At the moment when our relative speeds were about to reach zero, my sneakers suddenly grasped the principle of non-Newtonian fluids — the shoelaces tied themselves into a knot, causing me to kneel before her in free fall.
“Are you okay?” Her voice sounded like popping candy just opened, exploding on my eardrum. I stared at the three drops of soup on her canvas shoes, suddenly realizing that these three oil stains perfectly matched Kepler’s planetary motion law.
The chalk dust in the lecture hall always erupts punctually at three o’clock on Thursday afternoons. I shrank in the second-to-last row, watching the sunlight pass through her hair’s Tyndall effect. The moment I heard a cough from the front row, I reflexively held my breath, resulting in a thunderous sneeze. The six rows of seats trembled simultaneously, and the chalk dust transformed into a galaxy nebula, with two grains of stardust hanging from the ponytail in front turning around.
“Do you need a tissue?” The package of Vinda tissues she handed me bore the words “super tough,” reminding me of the curtains in the dorm that had been scratched into tassels by a cat. When my fingertip brushed against the small crescent on her nail, twenty-seven versions of response lines surged in my throat, but the only thing that came out was: “The air pressure is really low today, haha.”
Later, I slipped an anonymous letter into the desk drawer in the reading room she often visited, deriving the frequency of her eyelash vibrations using the Fourier transform formula. It wasn’t until graduation day that she clutched the crumpled letter and walked through the crowd that I realized she had long deciphered my handwriting — just like how I had precisely calculated the time difference for her appearance at the hot water room back then.
Universal Prompts for Deep Thinking
Many people use DeepSeek just to throw out a question and wait for the AI to serve up an answer. But AI is not a search engine; its true value lies in reasoning, not just listing items! Want DeepSeek to think more deeply? Here’s a universal prompt for you:
“Please engage in critical thinking during your analysis process, consider the counterarguments to your answers, and conduct multiple in-depth reviews of your responses, ensuring thoroughness.”
❌ Ordinary question: “How to improve work efficiency?”
Improving work efficiency requires combining scientific methods, reasonable tools, and good habits.
Case References
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Programmers: Use Pomodoro Timer + Jira to manage development tasks, modularizing code for reuse.
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Content Creators: Use Notion to build a topic library and quickly proofread copy using Grammarly.
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Managers: Keep meetings within 15 minutes, require agenda submission in advance, and send out minutes within 3 hours after the meeting.
Key Point Summary: Efficiency improvement is a systemic project that requires integrating goal management, tool optimization, and physical condition. It is recommended to start with 1-2 methods and gradually form a personal work rhythm, avoiding the abandonment caused by making too many changes at once.
✅ Deep inquiry: “Please tell me methods to improve work efficiency, critically analyze the limitations of these methods, explore the potential causes of low efficiency, and conduct multiple reviews of the answers.”
1. Common methods for improving work efficiency and their limitations analysis
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Time Management Methods (like Pomodoro Technique)
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Principle: A cycle of 25 minutes of focus followed by a 5-minute break
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Limitations: Interruptions can disrupt the continuity of creative thinking (e.g., programmers being forced to stop when in a flow state)
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Data support: MIT research shows that frequent task switching can lead to a 40% decrease in efficiency
Task Priority Matrix (Eisenhower Matrix)
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Principle: Categorizing tasks into four quadrants based on urgency/importance
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Limitations: Oversimplifies real-world scenarios (e.g., urgent but unimportant tasks may carry interpersonal value)
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Case: A project manager’s excessive filtering of “unimportant” tasks led to deteriorating team relationships
Reliance on Digital Tools (Automation/Collaboration Software)
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Principle: Optimizing processes through tools like Trello/Notion
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Limitations: Learning curves for tools consume cognitive resources (Adobe research shows that 67% of employees experience anxiety due to tool complexity)
2. Potential Crises of Efficiencyism
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Cognitive Overload Paradox
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Phenomenon: Over-optimization leads to decision fatigue (neuroscience shows that the prefrontal cortex has only 4 hours of effective time each day)
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Counterexample: A consulting firm saw a 58% decrease in creative proposals after mandating time-tracking software
Alienation of Interpersonal Collaboration
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Case: An internet company’s extreme breakdown of objectives led to inter-departmental collaboration devolving into a metrics game
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Research: Harvard Business School tracking shows that excessive quantification of goals reduces team trust by 32%
Innovation Suppression Effect
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Neural Mechanism: The brain’s default mode network (DMN) is more active in “inefficient” states
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Typical Expression: 3M’s “15% free time” policy led to revolutionary products like Post-it Notes
3. Constructive Value of Low Efficiency
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Value of Cognitive Redundancy
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Biological Analogy: 60% of the brain’s gray matter consists of spare neural connections
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Management Practice: Google’s Gmail was born from 20% free exploration time
Benefits of Error Tolerance
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Data: NASA engineering teams improved overall reliability by allowing a 10% error tolerance
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Cognitive Mechanism: Trial-and-error learning activates long-term memory circuits in the basal ganglia
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Organizational behavior studies show that non-task-related small talk increases team problem-solving speed by 27%
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Anthropological Perspective: The “inefficient” observation period in traditional apprenticeship systems plays a role in skill internalization
4. Multi-Round Reviews and System Optimization
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Identifying Blind Spots: Ignoring individual neural diversity (ADHD individuals have only a 22% adaptation rate to traditional time management methods)
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Supplementary Plan: Introduce principles of neurodiversity in work adaptation
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Cultural Dimension Missing: The alienation of efficiency metrics in East Asian collectivist cultures
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Supplementary Case: Comparative study of Japan’s “overtime culture” and Germany’s “hour reduction”
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Establishing a dynamic balance model: Introducing the concept of entropy management
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Proposing the METRIC system:
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5. Practical Framework Suggestions
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Efficiency Diagnosis Matrix | Task Type | Efficiency Strategy | Anti-Efficiency Strategy | Mechanical Repetition | Automated Processes | Inject Random Variables | | Creative Generation | Controllable Interference Sources | Cultivating Dark Time | | Interpersonal Collaboration | Structured Agenda | Informal Social Space |
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Personal Effectiveness Regulator
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Develop a cognitive energy monitoring app (combined with HRV heart rate variability indicators)
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Establish a nonlinear work schedule (reserving a 30% buffer zone)
New Paradigm of Organizational Management
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Implement a “strategic inefficiency” policy (e.g., banning meetings on Friday afternoons)
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Create an efficiency sandbox laboratory (allowing 10% of employees to conduct anti-efficiency experiments)
This multi-dimensional framework breaks through the two-dimensional limitations of traditional efficiency discussions, incorporating biological rhythms, organizational ecology, and cultural variables, providing a new cognitive schema for efficiency management in the knowledge economy era. Ultimately forming a new perspective on efficiency that is adaptive, tolerant, and evolutionary.
The results are immediately apparent; ordinary questions might only yield a few tips like “Pomodoro Timer,” while deep inquiries can lead the AI to think about the underlying logic behind efficiency, even providing practical suggestions. Don’t treat DeepSeek as just a tool; think of it as your “think tank”!
No matter how strong DeepSeek is, there are three “minefields” that will only add to your troubles if you step on them!
1. Long Text Killer? Logic Easily Breaks Down Over 4000 Words!
DeepSeek excels at writing short texts, but if you ask it to produce a 4000-word in-depth article, you might see contradictory and self-refuting content. If you want to write long essays, Claude 200K is more suitable.
2. Sensitive Content? One-Click Vaporization!
DeepSeek has a post-review mechanism, so the content just generated might still be there, but suddenly “vaporize” after a few seconds. What’s the workaround?
Change your question, copy a few more times, or even try another AI (GPT-4, Claude).
3. Personal Style? Don’t Expect Too Much
DeepSeek is good atstructured writing and mimicking famous authors’ styles, but if you want an article that perfectly matches your personal style, you still need to polish it; AI is a tool, not your writing enhancer!
Moreover, DeepSeek has done something truly remarkable!
It is completely free; you can ask questions on DeepSeek without spending a penny.
And not only is it free, but it has also opened its source code, making its core code available for everyone globally to use.
Anyone can deploy their private AI knowledge base based on the DeepSeek framework and optimize it.
I have deployed a personal knowledge base of DeepSeek on my own computer.
The following is my personal knowledge base deployed at home:
That way, I can feed my private information to DeepSeek, allowing it to tailor answers for me without worrying about information leakage.
Moreover, when DeepSeek answers my questions, it also shows me its reasoning process.
For instance, if I want to recommend animated movies for my 8-year-old daughter, DeepSeek will show me its reasoning process, meaning how the AI thinks about this issue, and this reasoning ability is at the core of DeepSeek.
Based on the previous reasoning process, DeepSeek finally provides its answer:
In this process, I can continuously describe my child’s interests and preferences to DeepSeek, allowing it to build a profile of my daughter and provide more accurate recommendations.
And all of this is on my personal computer, so I don’t have to worry about information security issues!
You see, this greatly reduces the cost of using AI, making it not just a tool for a few wealthy people, but accessible to every company and individual. This is truly a remarkable achievement.
Continue to do meaningful things, helping the world become a better place!
Just like DeepSeek’s open-source and free nature, it can not only help us grow but also benefit more people.
Doing meaningful things is not for being seen but to create value; not for getting a return but to make the world a little better.
