Two weeks in and the question we keep getting is the same one: how do I stop starting from scratch every time? Fair question. Most people use AI like a search engine, type a fresh question every session, and never build anything on top of it.
This week is about that. A few of these tips are about getting better answers, and a few are about not having to ask twice. Two are tied to things that landed in the past fortnight and are worth knowing about today.
As always, nothing here costs money and nothing takes longer than two minutes.
1. Save your best prompt instead of retyping it
Google replaced its Gems feature with something called Skills on 30 September, and the important part is that it is available on free accounts. A Skill is just a set of instructions you save once and call up whenever you want it. You type a forward slash in the Gemini prompt box and pick it from the list.
If you already had Gems set up, Google is migrating them across automatically. Personal accounts lose access to the old Gems from November, so there is no point building anything new there.
Worth doing today: think of the thing you ask for most often, and save it. For a tradie that might be quote wording. For a parent it might be:
"Whenever I use this, turn my rough notes into a short friendly email to my child's teacher. Polite, no more than six sentences, and always end by asking what they need from me."
Then it is one slash away forever.
2. Siri can finally see what is on your screen
Apple released its rebuilt Siri in September as part of iOS 27, and it is a genuinely different thing to the Siri you gave up on. The two changes that matter day to day: it can look at whatever is on your screen and act on it, and you can keep talking to it instead of starting over every question.
So with a flyer or an email open, you can say:
"Add this to my calendar and tell me if it clashes with anything."
Two honest caveats. It needs iOS 27 and a recent iPhone, which means an iPhone 16 or newer, or an iPhone 15 Pro. And it is still rolling out in English as a beta, so if you ask and get the old blank stare, it has not reached your phone yet. Not worth upgrading your handset over. Very much worth trying if you already have it.
3. Stop asking for options and make it choose
Ask any AI for advice and it will hand you five possibilities with the pros and cons of each, which leaves the actual decision exactly where it started. With you.
So do not ask what your options are. Ask it to commit:
"Pick one and tell me why you picked it over the others. I want a recommendation, not a list. Assume I will do whatever you say."
You can always argue with it after. The point is that a specific recommendation gives you something to react to, and most people find they know their own mind the moment someone else makes a call.
4. Write the phone call before you make it
Nobody enjoys ringing an insurer, a telco or a utility. Thirty minutes on hold, then you forget the one thing you meant to say.
Before you dial:
"I am about to ring my internet provider about three outages in two weeks. Tell me exactly what to say in the first thirty seconds, what to ask for, and what to say if they tell me nothing is wrong at their end."
That last clause is the valuable one. Plan for the no, not just the opening. Write the three key points on paper and keep them in front of you, because hold music genuinely does wipe your memory.
5. Photograph the model number, not the whole machine
Our technicians get sent photos of the front of a router when the useful information is on a sticker underneath it. Model and serial numbers are what identify your gear, and they are almost always on a label on the base or the back.
Find the sticker, photograph it, upload it and ask:
"This is the label from my router. Tell me what model it is, roughly how old that model is, and whether it is likely to be the reason my Wi-Fi drops out in the back rooms."
Age matters more than people expect with networking gear. If the answer suggests your hardware is the bottleneck, our guide to fixing slow home Wi-Fi goes through what actually helps and what is a waste of money.
6. Ask what you have not thought of
This is the most useful sentence in this whole article and it works on anything. A renovation, a holiday, hiring someone, buying a laptop, moving your mum into care.
"Here is my plan. What am I not thinking about? List the things people in my position usually forget, and the ones that are expensive to fix later."
You will get some obvious items and usually one that stops you cold. We used it before changing our own booking system and it flagged something about data export that would have cost us a fortnight.
7. Cut it in half
Everyone writes too long. Nobody has time to read it.
Paste anything you have written and say:
"Cut this by half. Keep every fact and every number. Lose the warm up, the repetition and anything that is just me being polite."
Then read both versions. The short one is almost always better, and seeing what got cut teaches you more about your own writing than any course will. Works on emails, quotes, newsletters and that message to the body corporate you have rewritten four times.
8. Rehearse the hard conversation from the other side
Pay rise. Price increase. Telling a long-standing customer you cannot do mates rates any more. Firing someone.
Make it play the other person:
"You are my landlord. I am about to ask you to fix the hot water system properly instead of patching it again. Push back on me the way a landlord actually would, and do not go easy."
Go three or four rounds. You will hear the objection you had not prepared for while it still costs you nothing, which is the entire point.
9. Teach it your trade's language once
Every industry has words that mean something specific, and generic AI answers get them wrong in ways that are obvious to you and invisible to it.
Spend two minutes writing the list:
"In my business, a job means a single site visit, a callback means returning for free because something was not fixed, and a quote is fixed price while an estimate is not. Use those meanings from now on and ask me if I use a term you do not recognise."
Save it into your standing instructions, or as a Skill from tip one. Everything you get back afterwards will sound like it came from someone in your industry.
10. Ask what you should be searching for
Sometimes the problem is that you do not know the right words. You cannot look up a rule, a part or a condition if you do not know what it is called.
"I am trying to find out whether I need approval to put a second driveway in. I do not know the right terminology. Tell me what this is actually called in Australia, which authority handles it, and the exact phrases I should search."
Then go and do the searching yourself at the council website. This is AI used as a translator between what you know and what the system calls it, which is the job it is genuinely best at.
Two things not to do this week
Do not paste private details. No tax file numbers, no Medicare numbers, no bank or card numbers, no passwords, and nothing private about a customer, a tenant or a family member. When you photograph a label or a document, check what else is in the frame first. Once it is in a chat box you have lost control of where it sits. If you suspect an account of yours has already been exposed, work through what to do in the next hour.
Do not trust a number without checking it. AI is fluent and sometimes wrong, and on screen the two are identical. Anything with a consequence gets confirmed at the source: prices, dates, phone numbers, trading hours, council rules, legal requirements, medication doses. Use it to work out what to ask. Confirm the answer with the business, the government website, or your doctor.
The one to start with
Number six. Describe whatever you are about to do and ask what you are not thinking about. It costs you one sentence, it works on decisions of any size, and it is the only tip here that regularly saves people real money.
Back next week with ten more.
If you would rather someone just sorted it out in person, our technicians come to your home or office across Australia. Book a HelloTech technician and we will get your gear working properly, AI or no AI.
