The Best Personal AI Assistant Prompts (and How to Write Your Own)

A personal AI assistant is only as useful as what you ask it to do. The same assistant can feel like a toy or like a chief of staff depending entirely on the prompts you give it. The good news: a handful of well-crafted prompts cover most of daily life, and once you understand the pattern behind them, you can write your own in seconds.

Below is a library of the best personal AI assistant prompts, grouped by what you're trying to get done. They're written for an assistant that can actually take action - like Everything Bot, which connects to your email and calendar - but the structure works anywhere.

A simple formula for great prompts

The best prompts share a structure: state the goal, give the context, and set the constraints. In other words: 'Do X, using Y, but respect Z.' For example: 'Draft a reply to the last email from Sam (goal), keeping it friendly and under five sentences (constraint), and don't send it until I approve (guardrail).' The more your assistant knows about your preferences, the less you have to spell out each time.

• Goal: what outcome you want, stated as an action.
• Context: which account, person, thread, or timeframe it applies to.
• Constraints: tone, length, timing, and what NOT to do (e.g. don't send without approval).

Prompts for taming your inbox

• "Summarise my unread emails and flag anything urgent or that needs a reply today."
• "Draft a polite reply to the last message from [person] declining the meeting, and wait for my approval."
• "Find the email with the invoice from [company] last month and tell me the amount and due date."
• "Unsubscribe-worthy? List the newsletters I haven't opened in the last month."

Prompts for running your calendar

• "What's on my calendar tomorrow, and is there anything that clashes or runs back-to-back?"
• "Book 30 minutes with [person] on Thursday afternoon and add a 15-minute buffer before it."
• "Move my 3pm to Friday and let the attendees know."
• "Block two hours for focused work each morning this week."

Prompts for reminders and follow-ups

• "Remind me to call the dentist tomorrow at 9am."
• "If [person] hasn't replied to my last email by Monday, remind me to chase it."
• "Every Friday at 4pm, ask me what I want to carry over to next week."

Prompts for planning your day

• "Give me a short morning brief: today's meetings, top three priorities, and anything urgent in my inbox."
• "Help me plan a realistic to-do list for today based on my calendar and open tasks."
• "What did I say I'd follow up on this week that I haven't done yet?"

Make prompts personal (so you write fewer of them)

The real unlock is an assistant that remembers your context, so your prompts get shorter over time. Tell it your preferences once - 'always keep my replies concise', 'I prefer mornings for meetings', 'my working hours are 9 to 6 London time' - and it carries them forward. With Everything Bot, that memory persists across conversations and channels, so 'reply to Sam' already means 'in my usual tone, and check with me first.'

Start with a few of the prompts above, adjust them to your wording, and save the ones that work. A personal AI assistant rewards a little upfront thought with hours back every week.