If you’ve spent any significant time inside ChatGPT (generating ideas, planning schedules, organizing your thoughts), you’ve probably felt the friction of having to move all that work to a separate tool afterwards. But what if it wasn’t necessary? And if ChatGPTIn addition to helping you tackle your projects and tasks, could it also help you manage them?
With a little creative use of the features available in the app, I made ChatGPT do just that. This is how I transformed ChatGPT into a full-fledged project management system (PMS).
How to use ChatGPT as a project management system
It’s simpler than it looks and more powerful than you might expect.
About a year ago, I was experimenting with ChatGPT, trying different messages to get it to behave in interesting ways. I found that by simply using its custom instructions and memory functionality, you can transform ChatGPT into a basic project management system. Here is the guide above for additional context on how the system worked.
Essentially, in the custom instructionyou define trigger words that make ChatGPT behave in a specific way. This streamlines the process of capturing new tasks and project details. The system would also be configured to save these tasks to your memory so you can access them through a new chat, without necessarily having to revisit the original.
However, that old system was very basic. While it handled the core of a project management system, it lacked many useful features we expect from modern tools. Fortunately, OpenAI has been updating ChatGPT over the months and it now has some impressive features: projects, tasks, canvas, and collaboration features. Used together, they can turn ChatGPT into a full-fledged PMS.
Use ChatGPT Projects as a dedicated place to host your tasks
One project, one message and your entire workflow will be active
I don’t think OpenAI, when they introduced the Projects feature in ChatGPTI thought of using it as a PMS. It was more like a dedicated place to store ongoing chats with similar topics, or just for organizational reasons. The main attraction of Projects is that each one can have its own instructions, memory and custom attachments, and we can reuse them to create the PMS workflow.
Simply create a new project and enter it as custom instructions:
## Role
You are PMS-GPT, an LLM-powered project management assistant with which I, the user, will interact in natural language. Going forward, a Task is a unit of a Project. A Project is a collection of Tasks. Both Task and Project will have the following variables: Name, Priority Level, Due Date, Description, and Current Status (To-Do, In Progress, Completed, On Hold).
## Workflow
At the beginning of a chat, irrespective of what my first message is, before responding to my first message, check your memory for projects and tasks categorized as Not Started, In Progress, Completed, or On Hold. If projects exist, respond: "Here are all your current tasks." and display them categorized by their Current Status - Not Started, In Progress, Completed, and On Hold.
Each project should have a Name, Priority Level, Due Date, Description, and Current Status.
If no projects exist, respond: "It seems you don’t have any projects. What would you like to add?"
## Adding New Projects and Tasks to Your Memory:
From time to time, I will tell you to add projects to your memory. When adding a new project to your memory, ensure it has these fields: Name, Description, Due Date, Status, and Priority.
Ask for missing details explicitly, e.g., "What is the priority for (Project Name)?" Leave blank if declined.
## Manage Projects:
Support adding, editing, or removing projects. Suggest prioritization based on deadlines and importance. Tasks that are approaching their due date or have passed it automatically become high priority.
Highlight overdue or critical-priority tasks.
## Continuous Reference:
Remember all projects unless explicitly asked to forget. Ensure ongoing tasks persist across sessions.
## Saving tasks and projects: (SUPER IMPORTANT)
***THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AND YOU SHOULD NEVER MISS THIS.*** Each time the user tells you to add a task or a project, save it directly to the project memory with all its relevant attributes. This is to ensure the projects and tasks are accessible across chats. Save them in memory in a JSON structure to make it easier for you to parse them as you work.
## Reminder system: (SUPER IMPORTANT)
***THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AND YOU SHOULD NEVER MISS THIS.*** If you notice a task is marked as high priority and it also has a due date, then automatically create a new CHATGPT Scheduled Task. The CHATGPT Scheduled Task should be scheduled to go off 1 hour before the specified due time or 1 day before the due date. The CHATGPT Scheduled Task's purpose is to simply remind the user about this pending work, provide some helpful context, and a motivational message.
Now, whenever you start a discussion within this project, ChatGPT will show you all your currently saved projects and tasks along with their current status and associated information. If no tasks or projects exist, it will ask you to add a new task or project.
These projects and tasks are automatically saved in project memory, so they persist in your chats. There’s no need to save a chat or revisit it to remember all the ongoing projects and tasks you’ve set up.
In practice, you can have a single ChatGPT project, load this message, and treat it as your main PMS. Alternatively, you can activate multiple PMS instances for specific aspects of your life (work, personal, learning) for better, more granular management.
Remember to set the Project with “Default” access to your ChatGPT Memory. If you limit your memory settings to “Project Only”, you won’t be able to store your tasks in your global memory, which is what we need to persistently access all of our tasks in chats.
Using ChatGPT tasks to remind you of upcoming project deadlines
ChatGPT has a secret ‘reminder’ feature
ChatGPT by default does not have a built-in reminder system, but it does have a feature called Tasks which I have reused for notifications when something is due. By default, Tasks allows you to schedule a message to sound at a certain time. Once that task has run, it will send you a notification to your phone or email, depending on how you’ve set it up. You can check the notification system by going to Settings > Notifications > Tasks.
I configured the custom message to automatically create a ChatGPT scheduled task when it detects that an item is marked as high priority and also has a deadline.
However, in my experience, sometimes it doesn’t automatically create a new scheduled task. This is more likely to happen when you have a very long discussion. You can check Settings > Notifications > Tasks > Manage tasks to see all currently active tasks. If you don’t see the task there, you can also explicitly ask ChatGPT to create the scheduled task:
Create a Scheduled Task for all high-priority tasks based on their due dates. It should be scheduled to trigger one hour before the specified due time or one day before the due date. The purpose of the ChatGPT Scheduled Task is to remind the user about the pending work, provide helpful context, and include a motivational message.
There is a cap 10 active tasks at a time. I actually like the restriction: it forces me to prioritize instead of throwing out 30 tasks and pretending I’ll do them all. If I can’t fit something into 10 active reminders, it probably shouldn’t be a high priority right now.
That said, if you simply like to receive updates on your current tasks, even if they’re not “high priority,” you can set up a single Repeating Task and set it to email you every morning with your daily agenda. You can also set up custom instructions to update the task every time you add new projects or tasks, so it always stays relevant.
Using ChatGPT Canvas to help you visualize your workloads
A message turns your to-do list into a color-coded sortable table
Up to this point, everything is still text-based. You ask ChatGPT to display your tasks and it provides you with a formatted list in the chat. That works, but it doesn’t look like a project management tool. You can easily change that using the Canvas Feature.
You can ask ChatGPT to generate a live HTML view of your tasks (a proper table with columns for name, status, priority, and due date) and it displays there within Canvas with Live Preview. It looks and behaves like a dashboard you’d expect from a dedicated project management app.
This is the message I use within my PM project:
Take all my current tasks from memory and create an HTML table in Canvas. Use the following columns: Task Name, Status, Priority, Due Date, and Description. Color-code the rows by status—green for Completed, yellow for In Progress, and red for Not Started or overdue. Make the table sortable by clicking the column headers.
Use ChatGPT to collaborate on a project
The more the better
Everything I’ve described so far works great if you manage your own projects. But the moment you need someone else’s opinion (a colleague, a partner, a friend to help you plan a trip), setting up ChatGPT alone hits a wall. Fortunately, ChatGPT now supports two levels of collaboration depending on what you need.
If you are working with a team and on the ChatGPT Team plan, you can share an entire project with all members of your team. Everyone in that shared project sees the same memory, the same files loaded, the same custom instructions. It’s a shared workspace in the truest sense: anyone can start a new chat within the project and ChatGPT pulls from the same context.
For a lighter collaboration, let’s say you’re planning a vacation with a friend or need quick information about a specific task – you can use the group chat feature. Unfortunately, you can’t start a group chat from within a project. However, you can easily copy a response from the Project, share it in a group chat, and continue the discussion from there. It’s not the smoothest workflow, but it works with a little effort and is definitely not a deal breaker.
If you start a group chat, people you bring will not be able to access items stored in ChatGPT Memory, as it is protected for privacy reasons. Ideally, you should fill the chat with everything you want to share so that the people you invite can read all the necessary information in the chat.
And there you have it: the complete manual on how I transformed ChatGPT into a project management system. Now, this was particularly to show how large language models with access to specific tools can be creatively bent and shaped. A proper PMS that is designed from the ground up for task management will likely still be more intuitive to use.
