Overview
If your usage is higher than you expected, or you are approaching your limit, this page is where to start. It explains what actually consumes your Work Credits and the specific changes that reduce it — most of which take a few minutes and cost you nothing in capability. This guide is about removing wasted work — not limiting useful work or giving workers less context. Your workers use Work Credits to do work — every source they check, document they read, search they run, and tool they call uses some of your allowance. So the question that decides your usage isn’t how often you talk to your workers or how long their answers are. It’s how much work each task involves, and how often that task runs. A request pointed at one inbox uses a fraction of what the same request uses when it’s pointed at “everything”. That difference — repeated every day by a recurring task — is where most of the available saving usually lives.Work Credits are the unit of your plan allowance. That’s the unit you’ll see on your plan, in
Settings > Workspace > Billing, and in any message from a worker telling you a limit has been reached.
The changes on this page help your workspace spend its Work Credits on work that matters.
The three things that matter most
How much work a task involves
A tightly-scoped task checks a few things and stops. A vague one keeps going. Usually the biggest lever.
Your recurring tasks
Scheduled work is often one of the largest sources of Work Credit usage.
Conversations that never end
A thread kept alive for weeks across many topics costs more with every message.
- Answer length. What your worker writes is a small part of what a task uses.
- Follow-up messages on the same topic. Continuing a focused conversation is efficient — often more so than starting a new one. Far more usage goes into the opening task of a conversation, including every time a scheduled task or an incoming email starts one.
This is why “send fewer, longer messages” isn’t the win people assume. Focus on scope, not wording.
Don’t optimize these. Keep writing complete briefs, give your workers the context they need,
and hand work between workers when it helps. Cutting these can make results worse. The target is
work that is duplicated, unbounded, unread, or runs more often than it needs to.
1. Scope the work, not the wording
The difference between an efficient task and an expensive one is almost always how many places the worker has to look before it can stop.- ✅ Tightly scoped
- ❌ Open-ended
“Check the Vendas inbox for unread emails from today. For anything from an existing client,
draft a reply. Skip newsletters and notifications. If there’s nothing, reply ‘nothing today’
and stop.”Bounded: one inbox, one day, a clear skip rule, and an explicit stop condition.
- Name the sources. “Check the Vendas inbox” instead of “check my email”.
- Set a boundary. A time window, an item limit, a named list — “the top 3 competitors”, not “the competitive landscape”.
- Give an explicit stop condition. Tell the worker what “done” looks like, and what to do when there’s nothing to do.
- Say what to skip. Exclusions prevent whole branches of unnecessary work.
This matters most for recurring tasks, because the saving repeats on every single run.
2. Audit your recurring tasks
Recurring tasks are often one of the largest sources of Work Credit usage — and one of the easiest to fix, because every improvement repeats on every run. Open your scheduled tasks and ask four questions in this order:a) Are any of these doing the same job?
A common and easily-missed pattern is a set of near-duplicate reports — a separate daily briefing per region, per inbox, or per client — that each reload similar context. Tasks that fire at the same time of day are worth looking at first. Fix: merge them into one task producing one combined report. You get one email instead of five, and the workspace does a fraction of the work.b) Does this really need to run that often?
If each run does similar work, a task running every six hours uses roughly four times what the same task uses running daily. Ask what actually changes between runs. If you read the morning report and ignore the rest, you’re paying for three reports you don’t use. Tasks that run more than once a day deserve the closest look. There are usually only a handful of them, and they can account for a disproportionate share of what recurring work costs.c) Is each run doing more than it needs to?
How often a task runs sets how many times you pay; how much work it does sets how much you pay each time. Two customers can run the same hourly email check and use very different amounts of capacity, purely because of how the task is written and how the worker is set up. Open your most involved recurring task and apply the four scoping rules from section 1.d) Is anyone reading the output?
If a report goes to an inbox nobody opens, delete the task. This is more common than you’d expect.3. Keep a conversation to one topic
A conversation carries its history forward. That is what makes follow-ups on the same subject efficient — the worker already has the context and doesn’t have to rebuild it. The cost appears when a single thread is kept alive indefinitely and used for everything. As it accumulates months of unrelated history, every new message carries all of it, and each message costs more than the one before. A small number of these very long threads can account for a surprising share of a workspace’s total usage. What to do:- Start a new conversation when the topic changes. Moving from last quarter’s reporting to a new client is a new conversation, not a new message in the old one.
- Don’t keep one permanent thread as a general-purpose channel to a worker. If you’ve been in the same conversation for weeks, that’s the signal.
- Keep working threads for work in progress. A conversation that runs for a day or two on one task is exactly right — this is about threads that never close.
Your worker keeps what it has learned and saved, but the working detail of the old thread may not
carry over. Ask it to save or summarize anything important before starting fresh.
4. Give each worker only the tools its role needs
A focused toolset keeps a worker on task and limits its access to what its job actually requires. Review each worker: which tools has it actually used in the last month? Remove the ones it doesn’t need from that worker’s Tools page — you don’t need to remove the integration from your whole account, and you can always add a tool back later. See Tool Permissions for how tool access works. This is also a practical argument for specialists over generalists. A worker with one clear job usually needs a handful of tools, not a dozen.5. Watch for the heavy tail
A small number of very large tasks can account for a large share of your usage. They’re typically:- Open-ended research (“find everything about X”)
- Whole-document analysis, where only a section was needed
- Multi-step work with no stop condition, where the worker keeps going
6. Pause what you’re not using
Workers you’re not currently using can be put on holidays — they stop processing entirely and resume when you need them. For recurring tasks you want to keep but not run right now, pause them rather than deleting them: pausing a task stops its scheduled runs and keeps the setup, so you can resume it later.Ask your worker to audit itself
Your workers can review their own setup. Paste this into a conversation with any worker:Your worker can see how it is configured, but not what it costs — the prompt above is
deliberately written so it reports the former and doesn’t guess at the latter. Pair its answer
with the actual figures from Settings > Workspace > Billing.
A quicker version
For a fast check on a single task:Quick Reference
These ratings are general guidance, not measurements. The actual effect depends on how your
workspace is set up — check Settings > Workspace > Billing to see what changes for you.
Next Steps
Usage Limits
Understand what each limit means and what happens when you reach them
Scheduling Tasks
How to set up and adjust recurring work
Plans and Pricing
Compare plans if you need more capacity
Managing Multiple Workers
Best practices for organizing your AI team