You will configure custom instructions, two projects and memory settings for how you actually work.
Most people who use an assistant every day have never opened its settings. Every chat starts from nothing, and they rebuild the same background by hand, message after message. The three lessons before this one showed you the tools that fix that. This exercise has you set them up properly for the way you actually work, in about thirty minutes, and write down what you did so you never have to work it out again.
You will need the assistant you use most, your notes from lesson 6.1, Custom instructions: what to say once, and a few reference files for your most frequent jobs. If your work files are involved, check your company's rules first, as lesson 6.2 explained.
If you drafted custom instructions after lesson 6.1, revise them now. If not, write them. Cover your role, your usual readers, your location and Singapore context, your spelling preference and the formatting habits you want or dislike, in under 150 words.
Then test them on three typical questions, the kind you really ask in a normal week. Run each one with the instructions on and again with them off, in fresh chats. Look for whether the instructions made each answer closer to usable, and whether any line pushed an answer somewhere you did not want.
Priya, the HR executive who has appeared throughout this course, tested hers on a staff message, a question about how to structure an interview, and a request for weekend ideas with her nephews. The first two improved. The third came back in short, plain sentences suited to frontline staff, which was fine, and in British spelling, which she wanted. Nothing needed changing. If one of your tests goes badly, find the line responsible and make it more general or remove it.
Pick your two most frequent recurring jobs, the ones where you keep pasting the same background. For each, create a project with short instructions saying what the job is and how to use the files, and at least two reference files.
Priya's two were staff announcements and interview preparation. The announcements project held the style guide, the depot list and three past announcements. The interview project held the current job descriptions and the firm's interview scoring sheet, with instructions to draft questions only from the job description and to mark any question about personal circumstances as one to remove.
Run one real task in each project to check it works. Read the output for signs that the files were used, such as correct depot names or questions tied to the actual job description. If your assistant does not offer projects on your plan, keep a document for each job with its instructions and files instead, and paste from it. It is less convenient, but the content is the same.
Open the memory or personalisation settings, as in lesson 6.3, Memory: what it keeps and how to manage it. Read every saved item. Delete anything wrong, anything out of date and anything you would rather the assistant did not keep.
Then make a decision about whether memory stays on, and write down why. Priya kept it on but deleted eleven of the nineteen saved notes, including the vegetarian preference, an old job title and two notes about her mother's health. She also set herself a reminder to review the list every two months.
The last step is the one people skip, and it is the one that saves you later. Write a one-page record of your setup, so you can rebuild it in another assistant if you switch, or restore it if something gets reset.
Include four things: your custom instructions, word for word; each project's name, instructions and the list of files in it, with where the master copy of each file lives; your memory decision, with the date you last reviewed it; and any other settings you changed along the way, such as data controls. A note on where each setting is found in the menus helps too, because you will not remember in six months.
Priya keeps her record in a note on her phone, titled "Assistant setup", dated at the top. When her company later approved a different assistant for work, she moved her whole setup across in under twenty minutes by copying from that page.
At the end, your assistant has custom instructions that you have tested on three real questions, two working projects with instructions and reference files, and a memory list you have reviewed and decided about. Alongside it you have a one-page record that someone else could follow to build the same setup.
Lesson 8.3, Run a fair side-by-side test, will have you compare assistants, and this record makes that comparison fairer, because you can give each one the same setup. Open your assistant's settings and begin with the custom instructions.
Write a one-page setup record listing your custom instructions, the two projects with their files and your memory settings.
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