No, I don't mash my own potatoes. I use mashed potato powder like this:

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This has still been surprisingly painful. TL;DR

Bring 4.5 parts by weight of water to the boil. Mix in 1 part by weight of mashed potato powder. Mix well and allow to stand for a few minutes.

So what's the pain? Why don't I just follow the instructions? Because there aren't any! There's a table with contradictory quantities in unspecified units, and every time I want to make some, I end up having to extrapolate and guess. So, for Deb powder from Unilever, we have: the bag above, which claims to contain 350 g of powder, if you look very carefully (it has a reflective background to make it more difficult). Before I found it, I weighed it and found 360 g.

Ingredients

Use, by weight, 4.3 parts of water to 1 part of powder, or 19 g of powder and 81 g of water per 100 g of mash. A “serve” is either 60 g or 187.5 g:

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For shepherd's pie, though, I'd make the mixture considerably moister, maybe 5.5 to 1. I haven't tried this yet.

Preparation

Boil water. Take off the boil, mix in powder. Wait 30 seconds, mix again.