When a Skill Is Worth Making

The enthusiasm problem

The week after someone discovers skills, they make nine of them. A skill for tidying spreadsheets. A skill for the quarterly board pack. A skill for writing LinkedIn posts, which they will use twice. A skill for a report format that changed last month and nobody told them.

Three weeks later, none of it fires reliably, two of them contradict each other, and they cannot remember what half of them are supposed to do. The tooling was never the problem. The judgement about what deserved a skill was.

So before any of the how, here is the test.

The three times test

A skill earns its place when you have explained the same thing three separate times, in three separate conversations, and expect to explain it again.

Three is not arbitrary. Once is a task. Twice is a coincidence. Three times, in three different sessions, is a pattern, and a pattern is the only thing worth writing down. Below that bar, a note on your own machine that you paste in is cheaper, faster to change, and honest about what it is.

Here are ten prompts I have written over the past fortnight, pasted below.
Find the instructions that appear in three or more of them, even if I
worded them differently each time. List each repeated instruction once,
in plain words, and say how many prompts it appeared in.
Ignore anything that appeared only once or twice.
MY PROMPTS:
[paste them]

Durable preference, or one-off instruction

The three times test filters for frequency. There is a second filter, for kind.

A durable preference is something true about how you or your team work, which would still be true next quarter. Our case notes never name the client. Financial figures always come with the period they cover. Anything going to the board is at most one page. Those belong in a skill, because they outlive the task.

A one-off instruction is true only about today. Focus on the Manchester region. Keep it under 400 words because of the slide. Compare it to last year rather than last quarter. Those belong in the prompt, and putting them in a skill is how you end up with an assistant quietly applying last March's constraints to this March's work.

The question to ask is not "do I say this a lot" but "would I still mean this in six months".

The cheaper thing that usually wins

Most of what people want a skill for is better served by a note with three blocks of text in it, which you paste. That is not a consolation prize. A saved prompt is instant to write, instant to change, visible in the conversation so you can see exactly what was applied, and impossible to fire at the wrong moment because you decide when it goes in.

What a saved prompt cannot do is apply itself. That is the only thing you are buying with a skill, and it is worth buying only when the pasting has genuinely become the annoyance.

MEETING NOTES FORMAT
Decisions first, one line each. Then actions with a named owner
and a date. Then open questions, marked as unresolved.
No bullet longer than one line.
REPORT TONE
Plain English. No adjectives before nouns unless they carry
information. Never open with a summary of what the report is about.
WHEN NUMBERS APPEAR
Always state the period covered. If the source does not give one,
write PERIOD UNKNOWN rather than guessing.

Why more skills is worse than fewer

Every skill you own is a thing you have to maintain, and a thing that can fire when you did not want it to.

Maintenance is the quiet cost. Processes change. The report format gets revised, the approval step moves, the phrase you banned comes back into fashion. A skill nobody has looked at in a year is not neutral, it is actively wrong, and it is wrong in a way you will not notice because it applies itself without asking.

Misfiring is the loud cost. Two skills with overlapping descriptions will both look relevant to the same task, and you will get an answer built from two sets of instructions that were never written to sit together. Lesson 5 goes through how that looks in practice. The prevention is upstream: fewer skills, each with a job you can state in one sentence.

Answer all five yes, or do not build it.

Have I explained this in three separate conversations?
Would it still be true in six months?
Can I say the job of this skill in one sentence?
Can I name the situation it applies to, in words a real task would use?
Does it overlap with nothing else I already have?