Making It Yours

The idea

Anything you ask for more than once should be written down once and reused. That is the whole lesson. The rest of this page is where to put it, and what it costs to keep going.

The recipe card box

You already own this system. Somewhere in your kitchen is a box of cards, and every card is a thing that worked, written down so you never have to work it out again. You do not re-derive the pie crust every Thanksgiving. You pull the card.

Do that with instructions. When a set of instructions produces something good, save it — the whole thing, exactly as you typed it, including the background and the example. The example is the part people leave out, and it is the part doing most of the work.

Two kinds of card are worth keeping.

• Your standing card. Who you are and how you like things. For instance: “I am a retired teacher writing for a neighborhood group of about thirty households. Keep things warm and plain. No exclamation marks. Short paragraphs. If you need something from me, ask before you guess.”
• Job cards. One per recurring chore — the newsletter, the meal plan, the letters, the meeting notes. Each one is the full brief from lesson 2, saved.

Where to keep them

1. A note on your phone. There is nothing wrong with this and no reason to be embarrassed by it. Copy and paste at the start of a conversation. It works with every assistant and needs nothing new from you.
2. A document on your computer. Same idea, more room, and you can search it.
3. The assistant’s own memory. Every major assistant has somewhere to keep standing instructions so you do not have to paste them each time. The names differ — you may see custom instructions, personalization, projects, gems, or memory. Look in settings. Paste your standing card in once, and it applies to every conversation afterwards.

Start with the note on your phone. Move to the built-in memory once you know which instructions have earned their place.

What this costs, in plain dollars

Free versions of all four assistants are genuinely useful, and everything in this course was written to work on one. What free usually means in practice: a limit on how much you can send in a day, and a slightly less capable version of the assistant when the service is busy.

Paid personal plans for the well-known assistants have settled at roughly twenty dollars a month, as of August 2026. Prices move and offers change, so check the number on their own site before you sign up rather than trusting this page.

What the money buys, in practice:

• More use per day, and far fewer “come back later” messages.
• The stronger version of the assistant, which is noticeably better with long documents and careful reasoning.
• More of the doing features from lesson 3 — reading files you upload, working through longer work, connecting to your calendar or your documents.

When paying is worth it, and when it is not

Worth it if any of these are true:

• You run into the free limit more than twice a week.
• One chore it handles saves you more than an hour a month. At twenty dollars, an hour of your time is a fair trade and then some.
• You want it reading long documents regularly — statements, contracts, reports, medical letters.

Not worth it if:

• You use it a few times a week for help with writing. The free version will carry that for years.
• You are still deciding whether you like it. There is no rush. The free version is not a trial that expires.

Two practical notes. You do not need more than one paid plan — paying for two assistants at once is a common and avoidable waste. And you can cancel from the same settings page you signed up on, at any time, and carry on with the free version.

Next: noticing when your assistant changes — because it will.