Most people meet AI as a stranger. You open a chat, ask for something, and get an answer written for nobody in particular. It is competent and it is generic, and after a few weeks of that it is easy to decide the whole thing is overrated.
The difference between a tool that is fine and an assistant that is genuinely useful is not a better prompt. It is context. An assistant that knows how your week runs gives you a different answer to the same question, because it is answering for you rather than for the average person.
The mistake is thinking that means telling it everything. It does not. Your entire life story is noise. What an assistant needs is a much smaller set of things, and most of them you could write down in one sitting if somebody asked you the right questions.
The shape of your week
Start with time, because almost every unhelpful answer comes from an assistant that does not know when you are actually available.
The shape of your week is the fixed structure underneath everything else. Which days you work. Which hours are genuinely yours and which are already spoken for. The school pickup that lands at 3:15pm on a Tuesday and 3:45pm every other day. The evening that belongs to swimming. The morning you protect before anything else is allowed to start.
Once an assistant holds that, it stops offering you a late Tuesday afternoon and starts noticing that Tuesday was always going to be short. It can tell you that the thing you just agreed to does not fit, before you find out the hard way on the day. That is what it means to hold home and work as one week.
Who is in your life, and what you carry for them
An assistant that does not know your household will keep treating home and work as two separate problems. In real life they are one problem wearing two hats.
This does not need to be detailed. Names, roughly how old people are, and the parts you personally carry. If you are the one who holds the appointments, the school admin and the birthdays, say so. If somebody else handles the food and the car, say that too, because it tells your assistant which loose ends are yours to chase and which are not.
The same applies at work. Who you work with, what you are actually responsible for, and what you keep getting pulled into that is not really yours.
The decisions you have already made
This is the part people skip, and it is the part that saves the most time.
You have already decided things. You are vegetarian. Mondays are not a work day. You never take meetings before ten. You use one particular tool for invoices and you are not changing it. Every one of those is a decision you have made once and then have to keep re-explaining.
Write them down once and you stop repeating yourself. An assistant that knows your Mondays are clear will not quietly fill them, and will flag it when you are about to fill them yourself.
Your boundaries, said out loud
Boundaries are different from decisions. A decision is settled. A boundary is a line you know you should hold and often do not.
If you routinely give away your day off, that is worth writing down, because an assistant can hold a boundary more steadily than you can at four o'clock on a Thursday when somebody asks nicely. If you tend to take on other people's admin, say that. The point is not to be told off. The point is to have something outside your own head that notices when the thing you said mattered is quietly slipping.
How you want to be spoken to
This one is small and makes a surprising difference to whether you actually use the thing.
Some people want the answer first and the reasoning only if they ask. Some want the working shown. Some want to be pushed back on when their thinking is thin, and some genuinely do not. Some want short. Almost everybody wants less padding than they get by default.
Say it plainly. Give me the answer before the reasoning. Skip the preamble. Say so when you think I am wrong. Four instructions like those will change every answer you get from that point on, and they cost you a minute to write.
What it does not need
It does not need your medical history, your bank details, your passwords or anything you would not be comfortable seeing on a screen in a café. Useful context is about how your life is structured, not about the things you would not tell a new colleague in your first fortnight.
It also does not need to be perfect or finished. The first version of this is always a bit thin, and it gets better every time you notice yourself explaining the same thing twice.
Where it lives
All of this has to sit somewhere your assistant reads every time, not in a conversation you had once and cannot find again. Set up properly it is already loaded before you ask your first question of the day, and you stop thinking about it.
What matters more than the mechanics is that it stays yours. It is your context, in a form you can read, change or remove, and it is not locked inside somebody else's product.
The hard part was never the storing. It is knowing what belongs in there and what is noise, and that is genuinely difficult from a blank page. Most people go one of two ways. They write far too much, and the useful part is buried. Or they write the obvious things, the job and the family, and leave out the boundaries and the decisions, which are the parts that actually change the answers you get.
So sit with the questions above properly. How honestly you answer them decides how much of this is worth anything.