Teach it about you once, in settings

If you've used ChatGPT a few times, you've probably noticed the annoying part: every new chat, it has no idea who you are. You explain your business again. You say "make it less formal" again. You paste the same background again. It's like briefing a temp who's very smart and has no memory of yesterday.

There's a fix, it lives in settings, and almost nobody turns it on. Twenty minutes here means every conversation for the next year starts with ChatGPT already knowing what you do, who you're talking to, and how you like things written. This is the highest-return twenty minutes in this whole track, and it costs nothing — everything in this lesson works on the free plan.

Two features do the work, and they're different:

• Custom instructions — a short standing brief you write yourself. Stable facts and preferences. You control it completely.
• Memory — things ChatGPT notices and saves on its own as you chat. Convenient, occasionally wrong, and worth checking.

We'll set up the first one properly, then get the second one under control.

Step 1: Open your settings

1. Click your name or profile picture — bottom-left on a computer, top-left in the phone app.
2. Choose Settings.
3. Look for Personalization. Both features live in there.

If the menu wording doesn't match exactly what I've written, don't panic — OpenAI moves this around a few times a year. You're looking for the word "Personalization," and if you can't find it, ask ChatGPT itself: "where do I set custom instructions in this version?" It knows its own settings.

Step 2: Write your standing brief

Open Custom instructions. You'll get a box or two asking what it should know about you and how you want it to respond. Here's what actually earns its space.

What to include:

• What you do, in one line. Not your mission statement — your job.
• Who you're usually writing to. Customers? Suppliers? Yourself?
• Your tone, described concretely. "Warm but efficient" beats "professional."
• Recurring facts it would otherwise ask for every time — your services, your general pricing shape, your city if that matters to your work.
• Where facts should come from, if that matters to your work.
• One or two hard rules. Things you never want to see.

Here's a version you can adapt. Change the details, keep the shape:

I run a small service business. Most of what I write goes to customers and prospective customers — quotes, follow-ups, scheduling, social posts.

Tone: warm, direct, plain English. Short sentences. No corporate filler, no "we are thrilled to announce," no exclamation points unless I use one first.

Useful background: I handle everything myself, so drafts need to be close to sendable rather than a starting point I have to rewrite.

Sources: when you give me a fact, use primary or authoritative ones — the company's own site, official documentation, the agency that publishes the thing. Don't rely on crowd-edited or aggregator pages like Wikipedia, and tell me where the answer came from so I can check it.

Never: invent prices, invent policies, or make promises about timelines on my behalf. If you need a detail like that, ask me for it instead of guessing.

Two of those lines are doing more work than they look like they are.

The sources line matters because ChatGPT will happily answer from whatever it found, and a crowd-edited page is fine for casual curiosity and a bad footing for something you're about to tell a customer. Asking it to name where the answer came from is what makes checking possible — an unsourced claim and a sourced one look identical in the chat window.

The never line is the one people skip and shouldn't. A standing "ask me instead of guessing" instruction is the cheapest protection you can give yourself against a confident, wrong, sendable-looking draft — the failure mode we talked about in lesson one.

Save it, then open a brand-new chat and ask for something small — "draft a two-line reply telling a customer we're booked until the 14th." If the voice comes back closer to yours than it used to, your brief is working. If it comes back stiff, your tone line is too abstract. Go back and get more specific about what you don't want.

Step 3: Get memory under control

Memory is the other half, and it works differently: you don't write it, ChatGPT does. As you chat, it quietly saves things it thinks are worth remembering.

When it works, it's genuinely nice — it remembers your business name, your regular customers' situations, what you're working on. When it doesn't, it remembers something you said once in passing as though it were a permanent fact about your life.

In Personalization, you'll find memory with a switch and a way to view what's saved. Do this now:

1. Turn it on if it's off.
2. Click through to the saved memories and actually read the list. This takes two minutes and is the part nobody does.
3. Delete anything wrong, stale, or none of its business. Each entry has a delete option. Deleting is instant and harmless.

You can also manage it in conversation, which is often easier than digging through settings:

Remember that my business is closed on Mondays.

Forget what you saved about my pricing — it's changed.

What do you currently remember about me?

That last one is worth running every couple of months. It's the fastest audit there is, and it occasionally surfaces something surprising.

Step 4: Decide what never goes in

Personalization means putting real information about yourself into a company's product, so be deliberate rather than nervous. My working rule: treat it like a postcard. Useful for anything you'd be comfortable having a stranger read over your shoulder. Not for anything else.

Keep out of both custom instructions and memory:

• Passwords, and anything that would let someone into an account.
• Full card numbers, bank details, Social Security numbers.
• Customer information they'd expect you to keep private — health details, financial details, anything covered by a professional obligation.
• Anything you'd need to un-say later. Deleting a memory is easy; unsending information is not.

None of that is a reason to avoid these features. It's a reason to fill them with the boring, useful, professional facts that make your drafts better, and nothing else.

Step 5: Use a temporary chat when you don't want it remembered

Some conversations shouldn't join your permanent record. There's a mode for that — a temporary or private chat that doesn't save to your history and doesn't feed memory. Look for it near the model name at the top of a new chat.

Use it for one-off sensitive things: a difficult email about a specific person, a question you'd rather not have shaping every future answer. Then close it and your ordinary setup is untouched.

What you should have now

• A standing brief that means you stop re-explaining your business.
• Memory switched on, read through, and cleaned of anything wrong.
• A clear line about what you'll never put in either.
• A private mode for the conversations that shouldn't stick.

Do the one thing that makes this real: go start a fresh chat and ask for something you'd normally have to set up with three sentences of background. That saved effort is what you just bought, and it compounds every single time you open the app.

FAQ

What's the difference between memory and custom instructions?

Custom instructions are a standing brief you write and control — stable facts about your work and how you want things written. Memory is what ChatGPT saves on its own as you chat, which is convenient but occasionally wrong. Write the first one carefully; check the second one every so often.

Do I need the paid plan for memory and custom instructions?

No. Everything in this lesson works on the free plan. Personalization is one of the genuinely free wins, which is why it's worth doing before you consider spending anything.

How do I see what ChatGPT remembers about me?

Two ways. In Settings under Personalization, open the saved memories list and read it. Or just ask in a chat: "What do you currently remember about me?" Running that every couple of months is a fast audit and sometimes surprising.

How do I make it forget something?

Delete the entry from the saved memories list in settings, or say it plainly in a chat — "forget what you saved about my pricing." Both work, and deleting is instant.

What shouldn't I put in my settings?

Treat it like a postcard: fine for anything you'd let a stranger read over your shoulder, not for anything else. No passwords, no card or bank numbers, no private customer details. Boring professional facts are exactly what belongs there.

It's still not writing in my voice. What now?

Your tone line is probably too abstract. "Professional" tells it nothing. Describe what you don't want — no corporate filler, no exclamation points, short sentences — and give one real example of a sentence that sounds like you. Concrete beats flattering every time.