Custom helpers

Sometimes one part of a job wants a different pair of eyes. A helper is a named specialist your coworker can hand that part to.

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What it does

A skill tells your coworker how to do something. A helper does a piece of the work for it — separately, with its own brief, and reports back. The value is in the separation. A copy critic that never saw the draft being written judges it more honestly than the writer re-reading their own work. A fact-checker that only checks facts doesn’t get distracted by whether the argument is persuasive. You give a helper a name, a description of when to use it, and instructions for its narrow job.

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The ready-made coworkers use them

Every one of the five ready-made coworkers ships with helpers, which is the clearest illustration of what they’re for: The pattern repeats: one helper that goes and finds things, one that checks the work before you see it.

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When you’d write one

• A reviewer that checks work against your standards before it reaches you
• A researcher that goes off and gathers while your coworker keeps writing
• A checker for the thing that’s expensive to get wrong — figures, names, prices
• A second opinion on a judgement call
• A specialist for a part of the job with genuinely different rules

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Creating one

On the coworker’s Files tab, alongside its skills. Give it a name — lowercase letters, numbers, dashes and underscores, starting with a letter or number — a description of when to use it, and its instructions. Write those instructions narrowly. A helper asked to “review the draft” gives you vague notes. A helper asked to “check every figure against the source and list any that don’t match, and nothing else” gives you something useful.

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Helpers, delegation, or dynamic workflows?

Three ways more than one thing works on a job.

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Common questions

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Next steps