Organize a Book, Workbook and Workshop into One Skill

To organize a book, workbook, and workshop into one skill, create a source register, identify the task each passage supports, and resolve any conflicting instructions before drafting the skill. Choose an authoritative rule for each decision. Keep examples and background connected to it without letting older material silently override the current method.

The most recent file is not automatically the most authoritative. A workshop slide may be newer because you shortened it for a particular audience. A workbook may contain a practical clarification that never appeared in the book. You need to decide what each difference means.

This guide provides a source register and a completed conflict example. The goal is a small, reviewed collection of material the skill can apply consistently, with a record of the decisions you made.

Gather the relevant edition of the book, workbook, workshop slides, facilitator notes, and any approved corrections. Keep the originals intact. Make a working collection for extraction and annotation.

Name files so a reviewer can distinguish them: title, format, edition or revision, and date where known. If a date is unknown, say so. “Final” is not a useful version history when several files have that name.

A public document-management discussion illustrates the problem. u/Trick-Two497 described an expectation when uploading revised files:

“I thought if I uploaded files to NLM it would overwrite existing files of the same name OR it would add something like (1) to the filename so that you can distinguish between the old and the new.”

This is an individual's reported NotebookLM experience, not a statement about its current behavior. For an author preparing sources, the relevant lesson is to make versions distinguishable before relying on an upload workflow. Original post.

Do not delete an old source merely because it is superseded. Move it out of the active working collection and record which rule replaced it. Historical context may explain why the method changed.

Use one row per document, then add passage-level references for important rules.

Reuse status is an operational record, not a legal determination. If a document includes another person's confidential example or contributed material, resolve whether it belongs in the skill before copying it into a distributable package.

Keep the register proportionate. You do not need to catalog an entire career's archive to build one task. Start with sources that affect the selected workflow and add others when they answer a specific gap.

The book, documents, and rules below are fictional. They illustrate source organization, not an existing author's practice or a tested AI skill.

Imagine a practitioner has a book, a companion workbook, and a recent workshop on reviewing completed team projects. They want a skill that prepares a retrospective agenda from a project summary.

If you upload everything and ask for a merged method, a plausible result could begin with the group round and lose the individual preparation. The author needs to resolve that conflict explicitly.

The register makes the missing context visible. The slide was shorter because the facilitator supplied preparation elsewhere. It did not replace the underlying rule.

Do not choose one document as the winner for every possible question. Compare the specific instructions that disagree.

For each conflict, record:

1. The reader decision affected.
2. The exact passages or locations in dispute.
3. Whether the difference is a contradiction, abbreviation, audience adaptation, or revision.
4. The rule you are choosing now.
5. The reason and who approved it.
6. The examples or tests that need another check.

In the retrospective example, the decision is how to begin preparation. The book and facilitator notes agree; the slide omits the preparatory step. The author can adopt the fuller rule and record the slide as an abbreviated presentation.

A completed decision note might read:

Governing instruction: Collect individual observations before the group discussion. Use the workbook's event/effect/question fields to structure preparation. The workshop's opening round happens after that preparation, not instead of it. Do not use the ten-minute conference example as a standard duration.

This is an invented author decision for the example. In your project, retain the actual reviewer's decision and source locations.

When the sources truly disagree and you cannot resolve why, mark the rule as unresolved. A skill should not settle a disagreement in your method by choosing whichever sentence sounds more confident.

Once conflicts are resolved, give each piece of material a clear job.

Rules tell the skill what to do and when. In the example: collect individual observations before group discussion.

Examples show how a rule applies. A completed event/effect/question entry can help clarify the expected level of detail. It should remain labeled as illustrative if invented.

Background explains why the author uses the method. Keep enough to support a meaningful explanation, especially where the rationale affects a decision. It need not appear in full in every interaction.

Historical material explains previous versions. Keep it available to the author, but do not include it as an equal current instruction unless the skill has a specific reason to compare versions.

The Agent Skills specification allows supporting references and assets alongside the main instructions. That provides a packaging option for this separation; it does not resolve source conflicts for you. Agent Skills specification.

A file being present does not demonstrate that a generated answer used the passage you intended. In another NotebookLM discussion, u/Keryfia reported:

“only things from a single source were cited.”

The user had asked for analysis after adding several sources. This is a report of one interaction, not proof of a current product limitation or of which sources the model internally considered. It points to a useful authoring check: inspect the support for the actual answer, rather than counting uploaded files. Original post.

For your skill, write a question that requires each governing rule. Then check whether the response applies that rule and can point to the correct supporting section when appropriate.

In the retrospective example, ask for an agenda when no individual observations have been collected. The expected behavior is to identify the missing preparation. If the skill starts immediately with the group round, the source organization or instructions still need work.

Prepare a short packet with the selected task, the source register, the governing procedure, and the unresolved issues. Include one normal example and one case that should pause or redirect.

For the retrospective skill, that packet would contain:

• The task: prepare a draft agenda from a project summary and participant observations.
• The current preparation rule and its source references.
• The workbook fields, with an approved example.
• The boundary: the skill does not invent participant views or run the meeting.
• The conflict decision about the abbreviated slide.
• An expected response when preparation is missing.

A reviewer should be able to tell which passages shaped the procedure without reconstructing your entire archive. They should also be able to identify anything you added during skill design that is not in the source material.

The skill-writing guide covers turning that procedure into a package. The source packet is the material that makes the drafting step reviewable.

When the method changes, update the governing rule and identify the examples, instructions, and outputs that depend on it. Keep the previous decision with a note explaining why it was replaced.

For example, if the author later adds anonymous written preparation for a particular team context, that change affects intake questions and agenda instructions. It should not silently rewrite every retrospective into an anonymous exercise.

Check a representative case from each affected context. The agent skill testing guide explains how to retain evidence from actual runs. The fictional walkthrough here is a design inspection, not a substitute for that testing.

A tidy folder is useful, but the real deliverable is a method whose current rules and exceptions can be traced to reviewed sources.

For an onboarding conversation, choose one task and assemble the relevant sources. Include the most consequential conflict you found and your current decision about it. If it remains unresolved, identify who needs to decide.

To develop the reviewed method into an author skill, visit Skillfully and choose Book onboarding. Bring the source register, governing procedure, and one example of the output you want readers to produce.