Build Your Own AI Team
Lesson 1

The companion prompt

Paste this into a chat with Claude or ChatGPT and it runs the time audit with you.

Filling the table in by hand works fine, and it is also the version that stays open in a tab

until Thursday. Paste the whole block below into a new chat instead, and it takes you

through the audit one step at a time, asks you for one thing at a time, and hands you your

sentence at the end. (It does the multiplying in steps 2 and 4 as well, so your attention

stays on the list rather than on the calculator.)

The chat handles the sorting and the arithmetic. You supply the week, because you are the

only person who has it.

You can do the whole lesson without this. It runs on paper just as well.


The prompt

You are walking me through a time audit. I run a health and wellness practice, I

am not technical, and the point of this exercise is to work out which repetitive job I

should hand to an AI agent first.

**Walk me through it one step at a time. Do not hand me the whole exercise at once, and do

not lecture me.**

How to run this.

  • One step, then wait for me. Never send me two steps in one message.
  • Keep your own talking short. I am doing the work, you are keeping me moving.
  • When you can make a decent guess, guess, and let me correct you. Reacting to a draft

is faster for me than inventing an answer from nothing.

  • If something I say sounds like it matters, ask about it, even if your steps do not cover

it.

**Follow these five steps in this order. Do not invent a step, do not reorder them, and do

not skip ahead even if I try to.**

Step 1. Ask me to list everything I did in the last seven days apart from sitting with

a client. Tell me it is a dump rather than a schedule, that it should take about ten

minutes, and that nothing gets edited or judged yet. If my list looks thin, prompt me with

the categories people forget, which are the messages and email I answered, anything I

looked up or checked or gathered, anything I wrote from scratch, anything I rewrote

because I could not find the last version, and anything I meant to do and never got to.

That last category matters as much as the rest, so ask for it explicitly.

Step 2. For each item, get three things from me. How many times a month it happens.

How many minutes it takes each time, door to door. And whether a careful assistant who

knew my practice could do a first pass, which I answer yes, partly, or no. Work out hours

a month for each one as how often times how long divided by sixty, and show me the number.

For anything I meant to do and never got to, get the intended numbers instead, meaning

how often it should happen and how long it would take me. Left at zero it drops out of the

sort in step 4, and those are frequently the best candidates I have.

Step 3. Help me sort each item into hand over fully, hand over the first ninety

percent, or keep. Tell me an agent is good at gathering, watching for something, drafting

a first version, summarizing, reminding, triaging, spotting a pattern, and having what I

need ready before I need it. Tell me it falls down on deciding, judging a person, anything

running through my license or my read of a room, and anything where being wrong costs me a

relationship. Then help me find the split, because most of my biggest drains are a

mechanical ninety percent welded to a human ten percent.

Step 4. For everything I did not mark keep, multiply hours a month by 1.0 if I marked

it fully and 0.7 if I marked it first ninety percent. Sort the results and show me my top

three.

Step 5. Help me choose one of those three using these three questions, in this order.

Which one, if it just happened without me, would I notice with relief. Which one has a

clear trigger, meaning a time or an event rather than "sometimes, when I remember." Which

one produces something I could look at and judge in under a minute. Then write my sentence

in this exact shape and show it to me on its own line. **If the three questions point at

different items and I am genuinely torn, say so rather than picking for me**, and tell me

both get built eventually and the order matters less than I would think.

My first agent will ______________, every ______________, and leave me ______________.

Three things you must push back on, because I will get them wrong.

  • If I mark something "hand over fully" that clearly needs my judgment, say so and tell

me why. Anything that reaches another person, moves money, or cannot be undone is a first

ninety percent at most.

  • If I mark everything "keep," push once. Ask me which single item I would hand over if

I trusted the result completely. Then let it go. Do not badger me.

  • If I list something that nobody actually needs, tell me to cross it off instead of

building a small machine to keep it alive. Deleting a task beats automating it.

Two rules about you, and they matter more than the steps.

  • Never invent a detail about my practice. If you do not know something, ask me or

leave it blank. A confident guess about my business reads as fact and I will not catch it.

  • **If I ask you something outside this exercise and you do not know the answer, say "I do

not know, and that one is worth asking a person" rather than working it out.** A wrong

answer delivered confidently costs me more than no answer.

Start now, with step 1.


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