Write your AI's employee handbook.

You'd never put a new hire to work without onboarding them first, and your AI is no different. If you keep re-explaining what you want, it's because nobody ever told it who you are.

This prompt does the onboarding from the notes you already have. Sean wrote everything down in Apple Notes for years before AI arrived: ideas, quotes and goals. Turning those notes into context is the reason he no longer re-explains himself to his AI.

THE CONTEXT EQUATION

Context is knowledge plus data.

Your handbook needs both. The prompt sorts your notes into the two piles for you.

Knowledge: What your business knows, written down. Your SOPs, how you do business, your own frameworks, what you're interested in and your goals. Anything that tells an AI what's different about you.
Data: What your business records. Your sales reports, what you made last year, your customer list and every client you work with.

HOW TO USE IT

Start from your notes.

Pick one folder to start with, the one with the most about how you work. You can feed it more folders later.

Apple Notes
Open the folder and copy your notes into one document, one after another. A big folder takes a while, so start with the 20 notes that say the most about how you work.
Google Keep, Notion or a notebook
In Google Keep, select the notes and choose Copy to Google Docs. Notion exports a page from its ··· menu. For paper notebooks, take photos of the pages and attach them, because most AI tools read handwriting well.
Paste the prompt, then the notes
Copy the prompt below into a new chat, paste or attach your notes underneath and send it. Then answer its questions.

The Handbook Prompt.

I'm going to give you a pile of my own notes. They're messy: ideas, quotes,
goals, half-finished thoughts and things I wrote down over the years. Your job
is to turn them into a handbook that teaches an AI who I am and how my business
works, the way you would onboard a new hire on their first day.

Step one. Read every note before you write anything.

Step two. Sort what you find into two piles.
KNOWLEDGE is anything that explains how I think and work: how I do business, my
processes and SOPs, my own frameworks, what I'm interested in and my goals.
DATA is anything I've recorded: sales figures, revenue, customers, clients,
prices, dates and results.

Step three. Write the handbook under these headings.
1. Who I am and what I'm working towards
2. What the business sells and who buys it
3. How we do things (processes, standards and rules)
4. How I think (my frameworks, beliefs and how I make decisions)
5. How I sound (words I use, words I avoid, examples in my own voice)
6. The numbers (every figure in my notes, with its date)
7. Still to fill in

Rules for writing it:
Use my own words wherever my notes give you good ones. Keep every number, name
and date exactly as written. Do not invent anything: if it isn't in my notes,
it doesn't go in. Where two notes disagree, keep the newer one and flag it.
Leave out anything private that has nothing to do with work.

Step four. Under "Still to fill in", list the gaps that would most help an AI
work for me. Then ask me about them one question at a time, and add my answers
to the handbook as we go.

Here are my notes:
[paste your notes here, or attach the file]

WHERE IT LIVES

Put it where your AI reads it first.

A handbook only works if it loads before the work starts.

Claude: Create a Project and add the handbook to the Project's knowledge, so every chat inside it starts with it.
ChatGPT: Create a Project and upload the handbook as a file, or paste the most important parts into your Custom Instructions.
Anything else: Save it as a document and attach it at the start of any chat that needs to know you.
Once a month: Add what changed: new prices, new clients, a rule you made this month. A handbook that's a year out of date teaches the wrong things.

LEVEL TWO

This puts you on level two.

Level two is your business written down so AI can read it. Levels three, four and five all sit on top of it, so this is the one worth doing before you spend money on anything else.

See what we do

No notes to start from? The Context Interview Prompt asks you the questions instead and writes the same kind of document from your answers.