Your first week with Dex

Dex doesn't ask you to change how you work on day one. The systems that stick are the ones that prove useful before they ask for habits. Here's a realistic first week — and if you only do the first two items, you'll still have a working system.

Day 1 — Let Dex show you what it can see

Run /getting-started (Dex offers it right after setup, and will suggest it automatically while your vault is under a week old).

What happens next depends on what you connected:

• Calendar and Granola connected? Dex analyzes your actual week — meeting load, your busiest day, who you talk to most — and then offers to backfill: creating pages for the people in your meeting history, pulling in recent notes and action items. The sensible default builds people pages from your full history and notes from the last month; it takes two or three minutes and you approve the plan before it runs. This is the "oh, it already knows my world" moment.

• Only one connected? Dex shows what it can see and points you at the missing piece.
• Nothing connected yet? Dex helps you connect the tools you actually use — and if a tool has no ready-made connection, it can build one with you on the spot. Sometimes that fails (company restrictions, limited tools), and Dex is honest about it; even the failed attempt teaches you a lot about how these connections work.

Day 2 — The first daily plan

Start your morning with:

/daily-plan

Dex reads your calendar, your tasks, and your priorities, then proposes the day: what must happen, what should happen, what could happen. It's opinionated but editable — tell it what's wrong ("the board prep matters more than anything else today") and it adjusts.

In the evening, try /daily-review: five minutes on what actually got done, what to carry forward, and anything worth remembering. This is also where Dex quietly captures learnings — including patterns in how you work best.

Day 3 — Capture without friction

Today, just talk to Dex the way you'd talk to a chief of staff:

• "I just got out of a meeting with Sarah — here's what we agreed…"
• "Remind me to send the pricing deck by Thursday."
• "Priya is moving to the platform team next month."

Notice what happens: tasks get created with proper tracking, person pages get updated, meeting notes get filed. You don't file anything — you mention things, and they land in the right place. When loose notes pile up in your inbox, /triage sweeps through and routes everything, telling you why.

Day 4 — Meet your people pages

Ask Dex about someone: "What do I know about Sarah Chen?" or run /meeting-prep before a call. Every person you work with gets one page — role, history, what they care about, open items between you. These pages update themselves from your meetings; once someone shows up repeatedly, Dex creates or proposes a page without being asked.

This is where Dex compounds. In week one it's a note. In month three, it's walking into every meeting with total recall.

Day 5 — Zoom out

End the week with:

/week-review

Dex looks across the whole week — what moved, what stalled, what patterns showed up — and helps you set the next week's top three priorities with /week-plan. The weekly rhythm is the skeleton of the whole system: daily plans serve weekly priorities, and (if you enable quarterly planning later) weekly priorities serve quarterly goals.

What NOT to do in week one

• Don't try every command. Dex has dozens of skills; you need about five this week. /dex-level-up will suggest more later, based on what you actually use.
• Don't reorganize your old notes into the vault. Let Dex backfill from your meetings and build forward. History accumulates on its own.
• Don't aim for perfect pillars or goals. Rough ones that exist beat perfect ones that don't. Everything is revisable by asking.

A prompt for day five

Before the week closes, try the move that separates Dex from a note-taking app — asking it to infer something instead of retrieve something:

It's been a week. Based on everything you've seen — my calendar, my
meetings, what I captured and what I ignored — what have you learned about
how I actually work? What's one thing I told you that my behavior
contradicts? And what should we set up next week that would help most?
Evidence for every claim.

A week of data is enough for a surprisingly sharp answer — and it teaches you the most valuable habit in the system: treating Dex as something to think with, not just talk at. A full collection of moves like this lives in Prompts to steal.

The habit that matters

If one habit survives the week, make it this: start the day with /daily-plan. Everything else in Dex hangs off that anchor — meeting prep flows from the calendar it read, tasks surface when relevant, and the reviews get richer the more days they can look back on.

First, fetch and read the page I'm referring to: https://heydex.ai/help/first-week.md

I just read the Dex Guide's first-week page. Design MY version of that
week — not the generic one. Look at what I actually have connected, my
real calendar for the coming week, and how much slack I genuinely have.
Give me a day-by-day plan of small habits sized to my real schedule (busy
days get thirty-second habits, not five-minute ones), and set up the
first day's habit with me right now.