Answering by talking

This workbook asks for a lot of writing. If typing at length is difficult — or simply not how you think best — you can answer by talking to an assistant instead, and bring the answers back here.

How it works

Turn it on below. Almost every question then grows a small button that copies that question, written out as a brief, to your clipboard. You paste it into an assistant of your choosing and it interviews you about that one question. The readiness checklists are the exception — those are for you to work through yourself, so they get no button.

Nothing happens automatically, and nothing happens to a question you do not ask about.

Bringing the answers back. The assistant hands you a block of text at the end. Copy the whole reply — the block and the words around it — and paste it back where you copied the prompt from: the same panel has a Paste a reply button, and it swaps the prompt for a box. There is also a box further down this page, which does the same thing for a reply you have carried further. One paste can carry a single question, a whole day, or everything you worked through, whichever box you use.

Nothing is read until you ask for it, and nothing is saved until you have seen what it would change. Answers that fill a blank are counted; anything that would replace words you wrote is shown to you in full, the old beside the new, before you decide.

A reply that answers the same question twice is refused rather than guessed at, and so is one that returns more entries than the page has room for. In both cases nothing on this device is touched, and the message says what to ask for instead.

What leaves this device, and what does not

This application cannot send anything anywhere. That is not a promise about what it chooses to do — it is a restriction the browser enforces on it, and a test fails the build if it ever weakens.

What reaches an assistant is what you paste into it. Before you copy anything you are shown the exact text, in full, so the decision is one you can actually make. Your existing answers are never included unless you ask for them, one numbered item at a time.

Some questions are built on earlier ones — Day 2 asks you to narrow a long list of values to ten, then to five, and each step is worked from the one before it. Where that is so, asking for your answers carries the earlier ones as well, because the question cannot be worked on without them. They are marked as material to read rather than questions to answer.

The earlier answer is sometimes on a different page, and sometimes from a different day. Day 3’s energy question is worked from Day 1’s energy audit, and Day 4’s purpose work from Day 3’s themes, so ticking the box on one day can send what you wrote on another. Which answers those are is fixed for each question rather than decided in the moment, and every word of it is in the preview like everything else: nothing is carried that you have not been shown, on the page where you decide whether to copy it.

That claim is about this application, and it is worth being precise about where the boundary is rather than letting it sound wider than it is. Two things sit outside it and always have:

• Your keyboard. If you dictate, the software doing the listening is not part of this workbook, and many keyboards send what they hear to their maker to transcribe it. That is true of everything you type here, not only of this page — but this page is where you are most likely to be dictating.
• Your clipboard. Some systems sync it between devices, and some keep a history of it. A copied brief may outlive the moment you copied it.

Whether to hand this material to an assistant is your call. It is worth knowing that most assistants keep what you type, and that this workbook is about the most personal things you are likely to write down.

If you would rather not

Leave it off. The worksheets are unchanged, and nothing on any page will mention it again.