Getting started
What Really Focus is, what to expect on day one, and how to get your first briefing.
What you've signed up for
Really Focus is an AI executive assistant, not another to-do list. It's a chief-of-staff that lives between you and your work — it remembers your clients, plans your day, watches your calendar, tracks your time, and catches the things you'd otherwise drop.
You don't manage it the way you manage Asana or Notion. You feed it context — by CC'ing it on email, forwarding messages, or chatting with it on Telegram — and it surfaces what matters back to you.
Your first day
The minute you sign up, three things are provisioned automatically:
- A workspace for you and your clients.
- A dedicated assistant email address on the
@assistant.reallyfocus.comdomain — yours for the life of the account. - A token to link Telegram to your account.
None of these need configuring. They're already waiting on the Integrations page inside the app.
The recommended setup, in order
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Tell the assistant about your first client. In the app, open Memory → New account. Add a name and a sentence or two of context — what you're doing for them, how you bill, anything you'd brief a real EA on. This is the seed.
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Connect Telegram. The fastest channel for forwarding emails on the go and getting nudged about things you'd miss. Takes about a minute.
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Start CC'ing your assistant on emails. Grab the assistant address from the Integrations page and add it to the CC line whenever you're sending or replying to client work. The assistant reads the thread, classifies it against the right account, and pulls out commitments.
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Connect your calendar (read-only). One click on the Integrations page. The assistant reads events to build context — what your week looks like, who you're meeting, where the gaps are. It never writes to your calendar.
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Wait for tomorrow morning. Your first real briefing arrives at 8:30 AM in your timezone. You can also generate one on demand from the Briefing page — but the value compounds the more context the assistant has, so the next-day briefing is usually a better introduction.
What to expect
The first week is mostly about feeding the assistant context. Briefings get sharper as it learns your accounts, your billing patterns, and which conversations matter. By week two, it's spotting unbilled meetings, flagging dropped follow-ups, and suggesting what the most important thing of the day is.
A few things worth knowing up front:
- You can correct it. Every commitment, nudge, or memory the assistant creates is editable. If it gets a client name wrong or assigns a task to the wrong account, fix it inline — the correction sticks.
- You can dismiss it. Nudges have seen, acted, and dismissed states. Dismiss freely. The assistant learns from what you ignore.
- The assistant has its own identity. The forwarding address is separate from your inbox, so the assistant only ever sees what you send it. If you want it to send mail on your behalf, you can connect a real Gmail or Microsoft 365 mailbox later — covered in the email guide.
What's next
Pick the channel you'll use most:
- Connect Telegram — for the phone, the road, and quickly forwarding things.
- Connect email — for the desk, the long threads, and CC'ing your assistant in.