Here is a habit I watched an agent repeat four times in one week.
Open ChatGPT. Paste three comparable sales. Type roughly the same paragraph they typed on Monday about how they like a CMA structured, which adjustments matter in their market, what tone the client expects. Get back a pretty good draft. Fix the two mistakes it always makes. Send it.
Four times. Same explanation, retyped from memory, slightly different each time. Four slightly different CMAs, and the quality depended on how well they happened to describe the process that morning.
That is not an AI problem. That is a process sitting in one person’s head, being re-derived on demand.
What a skill actually is
Strip the jargon and a skill is a folder with your instructions in it. You write down how you do a task once. From then on, when you start that kind of task, the model loads those instructions and follows them without being asked.
Claude supports these directly. So does Claude Code, and the same idea works in ChatGPT as a custom GPT or a project with instructions attached. The container matters less than the habit: the process lives in a file, not in your memory.
The difference in practice is not that the AI gets smarter. It is that it stops guessing what you want, and you stop paying the tax of explaining.
The three worth building first
Pick processes you repeat and that have real rules. In this business that usually means:
The CMA. Which comps qualify, how far out you will go, what adjustments you make and in what order, how you handle a subject with no true comp, what you will not put in writing. This is the single most repeated analytical task most agents have and almost nobody has it written down.
The pricing conversation. Not the number, the argument. What you show a seller who is 12% over, in what order, with which market evidence. The agents who are good at this are running a script they have never written down, which is also why it does not survive when they hire.
The proposal or scope. For anyone selling a service: what is always included, what is priced separately, what you will never agree to, the words you use for the guarantee. This one pays back fastest because the cost of getting it wrong is a bad engagement, not a bad document.
What goes in one
Five parts, and the order matters less than the fact that they are written.
- The steps, in the order you actually do them, not the order that sounds tidy.
- The rules that never break. These are the valuable part. “Never use a comp more than six months old.” “Never quote a price in the first email.” “Every number gets a source.”
- What good looks like. One real example of the finished work. This teaches more than a page of description.
- What to do at the edges. The case that always comes up and always makes you think. Write down the answer you already use.
- What done means. The check you run before it goes out.
The rules and the edge cases are the ones people skip and the ones that carry the value. Anyone can describe the happy path. What makes your work yours is the judgment you apply when the happy path does not hold.
The honest math
The first time you do this, it is slower. You are doing the work and writing down how you do it at the same time, and that is maybe an extra hour on a task you already knew how to do.
You get that hour back on run three or four. After that, every run is faster, and the saving compounds in a way that is easy to miss: it is not just your time, it is the review time. When the output follows a written standard, you are checking it against a rule instead of reading it fresh and deciding whether you like it.
The bigger return is the one nobody counts. A process in a file can be handed to a new hire, a virtual assistant, or a piece of software. A process in your head can only be handed to you. Every hour you spend converting the second kind into the first kind raises the ceiling on what your business can do without you in it.
We did this with our own weekly newsletter last week. The format, the research sources, the rules about what qualifies as news worth printing, the checks before it sends: all of it lived in my head and in a long conversation. Now it is a file. The next issue does not start with deciding any of that. It starts with the work.
Do this this week
Look at what you did three times last month. Not the big annual project, the repeated task.
The fourth time you do it, do it with a blank document open next to you. Write the steps as you take them, and every time you catch yourself thinking “well, except when,” write that down too, because that is a rule.
At the end you will have a rough, useful draft. Rough is fine. A written process that is 70% right beats a perfect one that only exists when you are in the room.
Then use it next week and fix the two steps that were wrong. That is the whole method.
