YOU-SHAPED AI / BY TIM WALKER
The power of AI,
personalized to you.
Start with the things you do every day. Build the help you wish you had.
Make it yours A free resource. Start with ChatGPT or Claude.Want a small first win? Try one everyday task.SAME QUESTION. DIFFERENT LIVES.
“Help me get my week under control.”
Without contextList your priorities, block time for important work, add your commitments, and review your progress each evening.
Fictional examples, illustrated with AI-generated editorial portraits. These are not testimonials or live AI responses.
WITH MAYA’S CONTEXT
The best work needs room.
- Two client drafts are due Thursday. Her clearest creative time is in the morning.
- School pickup is at 3. She wants evenings to stay free.
THE HELP CHANGES
Protect the hours that make the work good.
- Reserve two morning blocks for the client drafts before filling the week with smaller jobs.
- Group routine messages and admin into a short later window, leaving room before pickup.
- If the drafts won’t fit, decide what to defer or renegotiate. Don’t quietly move the overflow into the evening.
Maya decides which client work matters most and what she is willing to change. AI helps her see the tradeoffs.
Use this as a practice example
Copy this fictional practice example into ChatGPT or Claude, or change the context to fit your own life first.
Open ChatGPT Open ClaudeHelp me practice with this fictional situation. I can replace these details with my own before we begin. Maya works from a home design studio. Two client drafts are due Thursday. Her clearest creative time is in the morning. School pickup is at 3, and she wants evenings free. Her request is: Help me get my week under control. Ask one question at a time if a missing fact would materially change the plan, such as the size of the drafts or existing appointments. Do not invent the answers. Propose a light weekly plan that protects the creative work and the pickup/evening boundaries. Group smaller work only where it genuinely fits. If the priorities do not fit, show what needs a decision rather than adding more hours. Keep known facts separate from assumptions. Give no more than three useful next steps, then ask what you got wrong. Check the plan against the stated constraints. This is a draft only: do not send messages, change a calendar, create reminders, or make commitments. The person chooses priorities and approves any change.
The question stayed the same. The useful answer didn’t.
Now start with your life
THE PERSONAL INTERVIEW
What would you like
more room for?
Do your work well.
Make room for what matters.
When your days are full, generic advice gives you more to sort through. Start with a guided interview. Review the profile it creates, then build a 30-day coach around real tasks, your standards, and the time you have.
Paste into a new conversation in ChatGPT or Claude.
You choose what to share. General descriptions or a made-up example are enough. Check your AI app’s memory and data settings first. Privacy guidance
I want you to become a more useful assistant for the way I actually live and work. Start by interviewing me. Do not give me a generic productivity plan. Ask one question at a time and wait for my answer. Use follow-up questions when I am vague. Start with what I want help with, then learn the relevant parts of: - My roles, responsibilities, current priorities, and goals - What a normal week looks like and where work gets stuck - What energizes me, what drains me, and how I make decisions - My strengths, recurring friction, and support needs, in my own words - How I communicate, learn, organize information, and prefer feedback - The tools I already use and my current comfort with AI - The constraints you need to respect, including time, budget, privacy, and decisions I want to keep for myself Ask only what would help you support me. I may skip any question. Do not ask for passwords, account numbers, or unnecessary sensitive information about me or anyone else. Do not diagnose me or infer traits I have not described. After about 10 to 15 questions, tell me whether you know enough or whether one or two important gaps remain. Then draft a Personal Working Profile in plain language with these sections: 1. What matters to me right now 2. My responsibilities and current projects 3. How I work and make decisions 4. What gives me energy and what drains it 5. How to communicate with and support me 6. Useful recurring tasks you could help with 7. Boundaries and things that need my approval 8. Open questions and facts you are not sure about Keep facts, my stated preferences, and your tentative interpretations clearly separate. Skip praise and personality-label filler. Ask me what you got wrong. Revise it until I approve it. After I approve it, ask which parts I want retained. If this app supports memory or saved instructions, explain how those work here and save only the durable context I approve through the available feature. Tell me accurately what was saved and what was not. Never claim that saving a document guarantees memory in a new chat. Also give me a concise reusable version I can keep and paste into another conversation. Exclude anything I have marked private or temporary. Finally, use my approved profile to create a complete, personalized 30-day AI coaching prompt I can copy into a new conversation. Include the relevant approved context inside that prompt so it works on its own. The coach should ask about my daily time budget, use real tasks from my life and work, and adapt to my tools, ability, goals, and constraints. It should give me one day at a time with a practical outcome, a short explanation, an exact action or prompt to try, a quality check, a correction or feedback move, a brief reflection, and something reusable to keep. Review and adapt the plan on days 7, 14, 21, and 30. Use the five levels as a map: useful conversations; reusable context and setups; approved connections; reliable scheduled work; and bounded agent-owned jobs. Do not promise that I will reach Level 5 in a month or require extra tools that do not help. Keep my judgment, privacy, and approval boundaries explicit. The coach must not claim that a prompt creates memory, connections, schedules, or automatic reminders; those features must actually be available and verified. Where reminders are unavailable, tell me to return for the next session. Show me the complete coaching prompt for review before starting Day 1.Already have a profile? Get your 30-day coach
THE DIFFERENCE IS IN THE DETAILS
Less redirecting.
More useful help.
Make one real task easier. A little chosen context can turn generic advice into a practical next step.
“Turn these meeting notes
into a useful follow-up.”
The team needs decisions, not another summary. Launch is Thursday. One required approval has no named owner.
Summarize the discussion.
List action items.
Send a recap.
Useful advice can still leave you with all the work of making it fit.
YOUR LIFE. YOUR KIND OF WORK.
Start where
you feel the friction.
A plan you keep avoiding. A draft that isn’t landing. A spreadsheet that eats your afternoon. Choose one real thing and make it easier.
FIVE LEVELS OF PRACTICAL AI
Go further
when it helps.
You can use different levels for different work. Add capability when you have a real use for it.
Browse the complete resourceTHE HUMAN PART IS THE POINT
Give AI the preparation.
Keep your judgment.
Let it gather facts, challenge a draft, organize loose ends, or build a first version. Bring the purpose. Check the important claims. Make the decisions you’ll have to stand behind.
“Digital tools should buy me analog time.”
Tim Walker · You-Shaped AI
For people carrying a lot, who want to do it well, free up their schedule, and be more present with the people they care about. A free, independent resource from Tim’s AI for Your Genius teaching.