Save Your Best Instructions: Projects, GPTs and Skills · Lesson 2 of 7

Find the instructions worth saving

15 minutes to set up, then a week of noticing. Save what people actually paste, not what sounds impressive.

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The tempting move is to sit down and invent ten saved instructions on a Saturday morning. A "marketing genius." A "sales coach." A "CEO advisor." Most of those never get opened again.

The instructions that earn their keep are boring. They're the ones somebody already pastes three times a week. You don't have to guess what those are. You can watch.

In most small offices, the same few kinds of text get pasted over and over:

• How we sound. Tone, words you use and avoid, how you sign off. If you did the voice kit in AI in 60 Minutes, you already have this one written.
• A document format. A quote or estimate, a proposal, a job summary, a weekly report. The layout is always the same; only the details change.
• A recap format. Meeting notes, a call summary, a shift handoff: who was there, what was decided, who does what by when.
• A reply pattern. Answering the same customer questions: hours, pricing, scheduling, "do you service my area?"
• A cleanup job. Turn rough notes into a clean list. Fix a spreadsheet's columns. Rewrite a job ad.

Yours may be different. That's the point of the log.

Open the Paste Log template. Share it with everyone on the team who uses AI at work. For one week, each time someone pastes the same background text they've pasted before (or retypes it from memory), they add one line:

• What the request was for ("quote for a water heater job")
• What they pasted or retyped ("our quote layout and the warranty paragraph")
• Which tool they used
• How long it took to get an answer they could use (a rough guess is fine)
• What they had to fix afterward

One line takes about thirty seconds. Ask people to write down what they had to fix. That column tells you what the saved instruction needs to say.

If a week feels too long, do it in a single team huddle instead: ask everyone to open their AI tool's chat history and scroll back two weeks. Patterns jump out fast.

At the end of the week, sort the log. You're looking for three instructions that are:

• Frequent. Pasted at least a couple of times a week, ideally by more than one person.
• Stable. The background doesn't change every time. Your quote layout is stable. "Whatever the client asked for" is not.
• Low risk to get wrong in a draft. Start with work a person reads before it goes anywhere. A meeting recap that goes to your own team is a better first choice than anything that quotes a legal or medical fact.

A good first three, for most businesses: one voice, one document format, one recap format. They cover different kinds of work, so you learn something different from each.

An example (made up, for illustration)

*Ridgeline Home Services is a fictional four-person heating and plumbing company. After a week, their log showed the office manager pasting the company's quote layout nine times, two techs pasting "make this sound professional" before texting customers, and the owner retyping his meeting-notes format after every Monday huddle. Their three: a quote format, a customer-text voice, and a Monday huddle recap.*

• Anything that needs live numbers you'd have to paste in anyway, like today's account balance. Save the format, not the numbers.
• Anything one person does once a quarter. Not worth the upkeep.
• Anything you're not allowed to share. If the background includes client records, payroll or health information, it doesn't belong in a saved instruction. Lesson 4 covers this.

• Copy the Paste Log template into your shared drive (Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, wherever your team already looks).
• Add the first three lines yourself, from memory, from the last week.
• Send it to everyone who uses AI at work, with one sentence: "For one week, every time you paste or retype the same background into AI, add a line here. Thirty seconds each."
• Put a reminder on your calendar a week from today: "Pick our three saved instructions."

Check it worked

The log is in a shared folder, it has at least three lines in it, and your team has the link. In a week you'll circle three rows. If you're in a hurry, circle your best guess now and confirm it at the end of the week.

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Next: turning one of those pasted blocks into an instruction that works the same way every time.

→ Write one well

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