Teach Your AI Who You Are — Once

If you do one thing from this entire blog, make it this one.

Custom instructions are the settings that tell your AI assistant who you are, what you do, and how you like to work — once, instead of at the start of every conversation. They're the difference between an assistant who knows you and a stranger you re-introduce yourself to every morning.

Almost nobody fills them out. And the people who do usually write something vague like "be concise" and wonder why nothing changed.

What the builder does

The Custom Instructions Builder is a worksheet that walks you through it question by question: your role and context, the formats you want answers in, the things you never want (bullet-point avalanches, hedging, jargon), and the standing context that makes answers useful — your industry, your audience, your tools.

At the end, you assemble the answers into a set of instructions you paste in once. Every conversation after that starts smarter.

The compounding effect

Good custom instructions save thirty seconds per conversation. That sounds small until you multiply it by every conversation you'll have this year — and until you notice the quality difference, which is bigger than the time difference. Answers arrive in your format, your tone, your context, on the first try instead of the third.

Five minutes with the worksheet. It pays you back weekly.