Organise Your Digital Brain with ChatGPT Projects

‘We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.’ – Archilochus

You know that feeling when you’re juggling five ideas, six tabs, and a dozen half-finished chats with ChatGPT?
Your brain is buzzing, your files are scattered, and your best insights are lost in the mess.

Now imagine turning ChatGPT into your command center. All your notes, files, and conversations—organized by project, remembered forever.

As of now, Projects are only available with a Paid plan—but if you’ve already upgraded, it’s time to level up.

Stop Drowning in Ideas and Organise Your Digital Workbench

ChatGPT is powerful, but its outputs can turn chaotic if untamed. Every new chat is a blank slate, and they add up and up, until…that conversation you had yesterday? Missing today. If you aren’t organising as you go, being prolific can lead to more and more busywork.

The biggest productivity drain is disorganization. Every moment you spend searching, reorienting, or digging through old chats, your momentum breaks. You stop building, and start buffering.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use the ChatGPT Projects sidebar to stay organized, focused, and in flow. With all your chats, files, and notes in one place, it’s like turning ChatGPT into your personal productivity dashboard.

🧠 STEP 1: Create a new Project

Start with intention: Open the sidebar, scroll down to Projects, and click “New Project.” (If you don’t see this option, you need to upgrade to a Paid plan to use this feature.) Give the project a name that reflects what you’re working on—client name, course idea, content series, etc. You’re creating a container for focused work.

📁 STEP 2: Add your files and context

Set the scene: Upload any relevant PDFs, images, or documents you’ll need for this project. These live permanently in your Project, so ChatGPT can reference them in the future, and you don’t have to repeat yourself across chats. If you add instructions, then ALL chats in this project will follow those instructions.

This is very useful, if you find yourself constantly giving similar instructions for chats – set the instructions once, and they will always be followed.

💬 STEP 3: Start a new conversation in that Project

Keep your chats on-topic: All chats inside a Project are context-aware. That means ChatGPT remembers what you’re working on—so you can brainstorm, revise, and iterate without re-explaining yourself.

🔍 STEP 4: Navigate between Projects with ease

Switch gears smoothly: Need to jump from one focus area to another? Just toggle to a different Project in the sidebar. Everything stays tidy, with files and chats bundled together.

📝 STEP 5: Drag and drop your best work into folders

Don’t lose your brilliance: All chats and files stay saved within their Project. That means next week—or next year—you can return to the same thread of thought without hunting through past conversations. Instead of scrolling sequentially through your chronological history, get in the habit of assigning chats to proper Projects as needed.

*Beware – as of now, chats in Projects cannot be shared externally.

🛠️ Stay Organised with projects in ChatGPT

Whether you’re a creator, power user, or prompt engineer, this quick tutorial shows you exactly where to find the Projects feature and how to use it to turn chaos into clarity.

📰 New AI News This Week

• OpenAI launched two new reasoning models. o3 and o4-Mini, continuing their inexplicable naming convention
• Google released DolphinGemma, an AI trained on decades of audio recordings of dolphin communication
• Copilot announced computer use is available through an early access research preview, which can browse websites and click as an AI agent

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