Set an alert and let ChatGPT watch for you

There is a category of thing you keep meaning to check and never check at the right moment. A restock. A hearing date. Whether the tool you rely on changed under you last Tuesday. You don't forget these things because you're disorganized — you forget them because remembering to check something on an unknown schedule is a genuinely bad job for a human brain.

That is a good job for ChatGPT. You can hand it a standing instruction — watch this, tell me when — and it will run on a schedule without you. This lesson sets up four real ones, in descending order of how much I'd trust them, because the honest part of this lesson is knowing which alerts actually work.

Before we start, the money part, plainly. The bit where ChatGPT checks something on a schedule, by itself requires the paid version — ChatGPT Plus, which is $20 a month. ("Plus" is just OpenAI's name for the paid tier; the free version you signed up for in lesson one is what they call the Free plan.) It's a fairly new feature and still marked beta, so expect the details to shift.

Here's the important part: you can do everything in this lesson on the free plan. The difference is who pushes the button. On Plus, ChatGPT checks on its own and messages you. On free, you paste the same request in whenever you want the answer — same information, you're just the timer. There's a workaround at the end that makes that genuinely practical, and I'd rather tell you all this now than let you hit it three steps in.