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The 20-Minute Setup That Makes Every Session After This One Faster
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
Most setup advice arrives piecemeal — a tip about memory here, a tip about
projects there, picked up separately over weeks, each one applied late,
after you've already re-explained yourself a dozen times without them. None
of it is individually hard. The cost is in doing it scattered, one habit at
a time, months apart, instead of once in a single sitting.
The rule: twenty minutes, done once, in a fixed order, gets every habit
this library recommends separately into place at the same time.
The routine
- Tell it about yourself, plainly (4 minutes). Role, current focus,
two or three preferences — including what "good" looks like for your
writing or reasoning style. This is what everything after this step
builds on.
- Start one real Project for something you're actually working on
(3 minutes). Not a test — the genuine current task, so the project has
real context to hold from day one.
- Connect exactly one tool you'll use this week (3 minutes). The one
that's obviously relevant, not the longest list you can grant. Add a
second later, once the first has proven itself.
- Pick a default model on purpose (2 minutes). Fast for quick
back-and-forth, flagship for anything needing real reasoning. Decide it
once here rather than choosing blind every session.
- Write and save one prompt you know you'll reuse (4 minutes). Take a
task you already do repeatedly and write the outcome-first version of it,
once, properly — see "The Beginner's Guide To Saying What You Actually
Want" for the shape. Save it rather than retyping it from memory next
time.
- Check what it's kept, and correct anything wrong (4 minutes). Open
the memory or settings view, glance over what's been picked up, and fix
the one thing that's off now, while it's cheap to fix, rather than
compounding for a month.
What to skip
Skip doing this across five separate sessions spread over a month — the
whole point is that each step makes the next one more useful, which only
compounds if they happen close together. Skip trying to make any one step
perfect; a rough project name and an imperfect saved prompt still beat none
at all, and you'll refine both through actual use.
Guardrails
- This consolidates habits covered individually elsewhere in this library;
none of the six steps is new, the value here is doing them together, once.
- Twenty minutes is a target, not a hard limit — if step one genuinely needs
ten minutes for your situation, take it; the order matters more than the
clock.
- This makes sessions faster and more relevant. It doesn't make any given
answer correct — that check still happens every time, regardless of how
well you've set up.
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