If you’ve spent any meaningful time in ChatGPT—brainstorming ideas, planning schedules, organizing your thoughts—you’ve probably felt the pain of having to move all that work to a separate tool afterwards. What if you didn’t have to? What if ChatGPTCan it help you manage your projects and tasks as well as help you tackle them?
Using some creative use of existing in-app features, I made ChatGPT do just that. How I turned 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 experimented with ChatGPT, trying various tricks to make it behave in interesting ways. I’ve found that just by using its custom manual and memory functionality, you can turn ChatGPT into a basic project management system. For further context, the previous guide is here how the system works.
Basically, per year special instructionYou define trigger words that force ChatGPT to behave in a particular way. This facilitates the process of obtaining new tasks and project details. The system will also be configured to store these tasks in its memory memory That way, you can access them via a new conversation—no need to revisit the original conversation.
This old system was very crude. Although it handled the core of a project management system, it lacked many of the useful features we’ve come to expect from modern tools. Thankfully, OpenAI has been updating ChatGPT for months and now has some impressive features – Projects, Tasks, Canvas and collaboration features. Used together, these can turn ChatGPT into a full-fledged PMS.
Use ChatGPT Projects as a custom place to post your tasks
One project, one request, and your entire workflow is live
I don’t think they provide OpenAI Projects are available on ChatGPTI thought about using it as a PMS. It was more like a special place to keep similar themed ongoing conversations, or just for organizational reasons. The main advantage of projects is that each can have its own individual instructions, memory and file attachments, which we can define to build a PMS workflow.
Simply create a new Project and include these 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 that project, ChatGPT will show you all the projects and tasks you currently have saved, along with their current status and related information. If there is no task or project, it will prompt you to add a new task or project.
These projects and tasks are automatically saved in the project memory, so they continue in your conversations. No need to save or revisit a conversation to remember all your ongoing projects and tasks you’ve set up.
In practice, you can only have one ChatGPT Project, download this command and treat it as the main PMS. Alternatively, you can spin up multiple PMS instances for specific aspects of your life (work, personal, study) for better, more granular management.
Don’t forget to configure the project with “Default” access to your ChatGPT Storage. If you limit the Storage settings to “Project Only”, it won’t be able to store your tasks in its global Storage, which is what we need to continuously access all our tasks between chats.
Use ChatGPT Tasks to remind you of upcoming project deadlines
ChatGPT has a hidden “reminder” feature
By default, ChatGPT does not have a built-in reminder system, but it does have a feature called Tasks I set it for notifications when something is due. By default, Tasks lets you schedule an offer to go off at a specific time. Once this Task is complete, it sends a notification to your phone or email, depending on how you configured it. You can check the notification system by going to Settings > Notifications > Tasks.
I’ve configured a custom prompt that says when an item is marked as high priority and also has a due date.
In my experience, sometimes it doesn’t automatically create a new scheduled Task. This is most likely to happen when you have a really long discussion. To see all currently active tasks, you can go to Settings > Notifications > Tasks > Manage tasks. If you don’t see the task there, you can also suggest that ChatGPT create a 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.
It has a cover 10 active tasks at once. I really like the limitation – it forces me to prioritize instead of doing 30 tasks and pretending I’ll get to them all. If I can’t fit something into 10 active reminders, it probably shouldn’t be a high priority right now.
However, if you just like getting updates on your current tasks, even if they aren’t “high priority”, you could potentially set up a single recurring Task and configure it to email you every morning with your daily agenda. You can also configure custom instructions to update a task every time you add new projects or tasks so it always stays relevant.
Use ChatGPT Canvas to visualize your workloads
One command turns the task list into a color-coded, sortable table
Everything up to this point is still text-based. You ask ChatGPT to display your tasks and it gives you a formatted list in the chat. It works, but it doesn’t feel like a project management tool. you can easily change this using 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’s displayed in Canvas with Live Preview. It looks and behaves like a dashboard you’d expect from a dedicated PM app.
Here is the query I use in 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 merrier
Everything I’ve described so far works great if you’re running your own projects. But the moment you need someone else’s information—a colleague, a partner, a friend helping you plan your trip—a single ChatGPT setup hits the wall. Fortunately, ChatGPT now supports two levels of collaboration depending on your needs.
If you’re working with a team and on the ChatGPT Team plan, you can share the entire project with all your team members. Everyone in that shared project sees the same memory, the same downloaded files, the same custom instructions. It’s a shared workspace in a true sense – anyone can start a new conversation within a project, and ChatGPT takes it from the same context.
For a lighter collaboration, say you are planning a vacation with a friend or need quick input on a specific task – you can use the Group Chat feature. Unfortunately, you cannot start a Group Chat from within a project. However, you can easily copy a reply from the Draft, share it in Group Chat, and continue the discussion from there. It’s not the most convenient workflow, but it works with a little effort, and it’s certainly not a deal breaker.
If you start a group chat, the people you bring will not be able to access items stored in ChatGPT Storage, as it is protected for privacy reasons. Ideally, you should populate the chat with everything you want to share so that the people you invite can read all the necessary information in the chat itself.
And here it is – the entire tutorial on how I turned ChatGPT into a project management system. Now this was to demonstrate how you can bend and shape large language models in creative ways with access to special tools. A proper PMS designed from the ground up for task management will probably feel more intuitive to use.
