Context · Sep 23, 2026 · 5 min

Explain how you work once (and stop repeating it to the AI)

There's a ritual almost every freelancer who uses AI repeats: open a new chat and explain the same things again. "Write like me, friendly but no emojis." "My proposals have three parts." "The price goes at the end, never at the start." Ten minutes of instructions before the task even begins.

That knowledge (how you work, how you write, the order you do things in) is also part of your business context. And like any context that only lives in your head, you have to repeat it over and over.

What Notion skills are

Skills arrived with Notion 3.7 on September 15: reusable instructions that teach AI how you work. You can create one by chatting with Notion Agent, or let Notion suggest skills based on your existing work. They live in a library, you run them by typing / in the agent chat, and they can also run automatically.

The detail we like most: you can download them as a SKILL.md file to use with other agents, like Claude Code, Codex or Cursor. You write them once in Notion and take them wherever you work.

The first three we would write

• Sales proposal: your structure, your reference prices and what you never promise.
• New client welcome: what you need from them, the timelines and how you will communicate.
• Weekly summary: which projects moved forward, what is blocked and which invoices are still pending.

How to write a good skill

Write it the way you'd explain it to someone who starts working with you on Monday: what you want to achieve, in what order, what is essential and which mistakes to avoid. Short and specific beats long and generic. And review it now and then, because the way you work changes too.

It's the first layer applied to AI: a single place with the truth of your business, which now also includes the way you work. If you're not sure your context is in order, the 2-minute diagnostic will tell you.