Short on time? Here’s the whole article in four lines.
- Tired of explaining your business every time? You can tell AI about yourself once, and it remembers.
- Custom instructions apply to every chat: who you are, your business, and how you like answers.
- Projects (or Gems, or custom GPTs) are workspaces for one topic, with their own instructions and files.
- Ten minutes of setup makes every future answer more useful and more like you.
| Feature | What it does | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Custom instructions | A short note about you that the AI reads before every chat | Your basics: business, audience, tone |
| Projects | A workspace with its own instructions and uploaded files | Ongoing work, like your newsletter or a product launch |
| Memory | The AI remembers facts from past chats, if you turn it on | Picking up where you left off |
| Tool | Look for |
|---|---|
| Claude | Settings, then your profile and preferences. Projects are in the sidebar. |
| ChatGPT | Settings, then Personalization for custom instructions. Projects and custom GPTs are in the sidebar. |
| Gemini | Gems, for saved assistants with their own instructions. Saved info is in settings. |
Menus move around as tools update. If you can’t find it, ask the AI: “Where do I set custom instructions in this app?”
Copy this, fill in the brackets, and paste it into your custom instructions:
I run [a small bookkeeping business] in [Denver]. My clients are [busy shop owners who hate spreadsheets]. I write in a [warm, plain, no-jargon] voice. Keep answers [short, with bullet points when helpful]. Use [American] spelling. If something is uncertain, say so. Ask me a question if my request is unclear.
Leave out passwords, client names, and anything private. See Is AI Safe? Privacy and Your Data.
A project is like a folder with a brain. Make one for each big, ongoing piece of work:
Every chat inside the project already knows all of it.
Rachel is a career coach. She used to start every chat with the same paragraph about her business, and she still got answers that sounded generic.
She spent ten minutes writing custom instructions and set up a project with her coaching packages and three of her best emails. Now she asks, “Draft this week’s LinkedIn post about salary negotiation,” and the first draft already sounds like her.
