Why ChatGPT Finally Started Helping Me Hit My Goals
ChatGPT gets more useful when each area of life has its own project, instructions, goals, and source material. Organize the context so the assistant can help you make progress.
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ChatGPT can feel like a Ferrari parked in the garage. It has plenty of power, but if every conversation starts from zero, you spend your time explaining instead of moving forward.
The fix is to stop treating ChatGPT as one giant chat box. Use Projects to give each important area of your life its own context, instructions, and history.
Put one area in one project
Projects are folders for conversations, but that description undersells them. A project can also carry instructions that tell ChatGPT what the area is about, what you are trying to accomplish, and what background it should remember.
Start with a part of life or work that has recurring questions. Fitness is a useful example. Put the conversations about training and goals together, then add the details that shape good advice: where you are starting, where you want to go, and the constraints you are working within.
The same structure works for a podcast, a marketing client, a book, a home, a business, or a skill you want to develop. A project for your home might contain the number of stories, HVAC details, plumbing information, warranty documents, and maintenance history. When you ask about a roof or appliance later, you do not have to recreate the context.
This is more useful than putting every conversation into one universal assistant. You do not want your house details mixed into a marketing strategy question. Specific context produces better answers than a giant pile of general context.
Make the first conversation an interview
The first conversation in a project should not be “help me with this one task.” Make it an interview that creates the project instructions.
Tell ChatGPT what the project is and ask it to question you about the information it needs for future conversations. For a Cars project, it might ask about the make and model, mileage, owners, maintenance history, and recurring problems. Once you answer, ask it to turn those details into project instructions.
That small setup step pays off repeatedly. Later, when you ask about an oil change, the project already knows which cars you own and what has been done before. You are not asking a generic assistant for generic advice. You are asking an assistant with the relevant history.
The same approach works at work. A podcast pre-production project can contain the production process and audience. A book project can contain the thesis, structure, source material, and packaging goals. A LinkedIn project can contain the voice, formats, and standards you want every post to follow.
Add source material carefully
Projects become more useful when you add documents that genuinely improve the answer. A book draft can give ChatGPT the context it needs to create a press release, outline an event, or repurpose a chapter. A home warranty can help it explain what information a contractor may need. Your own notes can preserve decisions that would otherwise disappear in old chats.
The goal is not to upload everything. Add the material that shapes the project’s decisions, and keep the instructions clear about what matters. If a document is temporary, archive the project when the work is complete. If it describes an ongoing area of life, keep refining it as circumstances change.
This setup also helps with goals. Write down what success looks like and ask the project to use that goal when it answers. It can help you notice the next step, compare a decision to the outcome you want, and keep a long-running effort from dissolving into disconnected conversations.
ChatGPT becomes much more useful when it has the right context at the right time. Organize your work and life into focused projects, interview the assistant before you start, and give each project the information it needs. You will spend less time repeating yourself and more time making progress.
In this AI marketing podcast episode, Dan Sanchez breaks down how to stop using ChatGPT like a chaotic chat box and start using it like a strategic operating system for your life and work. He shows how ChatGPT Projects can turn scattered conversations into organized, context-rich systems that help you advance fitness, work, marketing, home management, and personal goals faster and smarter.
My Favorite AI Tools
• Tella – https://danchez.com/tella
• High Level – https://danchez.com/highlevel
• Zencastr – https://danchez.com/podtools
• n8n – https://danchez.com/n8n
Resources Mentioned
• Blood work & biomarker tracking (Superpower) – https://dances.com/superpower
• Own the Show (book) – https://ownthe.show/
Timestamps
• What ChatGPT Projects are and why they matter – 03:10
• Using projects to organize life areas (fitness example) – 07:45
• Adding goals, personal data, and context via project instructions – 12:30
• Uploading blood work and optimizing health with AI – 18:20
• Applying projects to work, home, books, and marketing – 24:40
• How to properly start every new project with an interview prompt – 31:10
Speaker: If you're using ChatGPT every single day but you feel like you're not quite getting enough out of it, like you could be getting more, like you have a Ferrari parked in the garage and you haven't figured out how to take it out, watch this video because I'm going to show you how to take it from chaos to an organized system that will advance the goals across all the different areas of your life. So welcome back to the AI driver marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez, my friends call me Danchez. And I've been doing this more and more with a specific feature called chat GPT projects. And while I've talked about projects before on this very channel, go back and watch the full video to get the breakdown of all the little technical setup of projects. In this video, I wanted to show you how I'm using it in order to advance the goals and the different behaviors that I want to see changed in my actual life. to be able to advance all these different areas forward faster in a smarter way. Because ChatGPT is really good when it has more context. And the more context we give it, the better it does. But not just all context for all questions.
Speaker: We need give it specific context for specific parts of our life, which is why we need to organize our life in ChatGPT in order to advance it forward. Let me show you what I'm doing. For those listening to the audio podcast, I am on my screen in my ChatGPT account, but I'll do my best to explain what I'm doing when I'm doing it so that you don't lose anything.
Speaker: Otherwise go to YouTube and watch the video there if you want to see what I'm actually zooming around and clicking on. So in the left hand side of chat GPT it's under all the different settings and custom GPTs on the left hand side you will see this thing called projects where don't have any projects you'll see a new button called new project where you can set up a new project give it a name pick a little icon maybe give it a color and click some other settings I won't go into that much but you'll see I have a ton of different projects on the left hand side. Projects are amazing for organizing conversations because oftentimes we'll have conversations about all kinds of things. And have ever gone back to search for that conversation you had three months ago and then got frustrated when you couldn't find it? Yeah, that happens to all of us. But with projects, it's a lot easier to find it when you can just group them into folders. But that's not all it does. In a project, it actually takes more account into what you're talking about. One thing that I've started doing with every single project that has been making a massive difference. And I noticed it first with one of my key projects around fitness. Now, I know this is a show about AI and marketing, but just hear me out when it comes to this fitness thing. One, we all have a fitness journey ourselves, but two, just take this and apply to any area of your life, even within work, whether it comes to a new work project that you're working on, maybe a specific task your boss has given you, or a new...
Speaker: discipline that you want to grow and learn in when it comes to your career as a marketer or as a business owner. In this one, I'm going to use fitness because it's awesome. And this is where I really started understanding the power of projects because all my fitness conversations are in one project. So it's easier for Chatshapiti to reference them all and see like, oh, I remember we had a conversation about this before. Maybe I'm going to add that and take that into account and having this new conversation about that similar thing. But more importantly, it has my goals. Yes, over here on the upper right hand side, there's this little hidden dot dot dot area where one of the most important things are under project settings.
Speaker: You can see you can rename and repick your icon, but you can also have these things called instructions. And this is the power of projects is you can load it with custom instructions so that the project every time you have a conversation with it it has the context it has the understanding of what this project is about the goals that you have set and the things that it needs to know like in this fitness project it has my general details like my height my weight my fitness goals where i'm currently at where i've come from and where i'm trying to actually get with my own fitness journey right but you could do that for all your marketing projects too now what's even cooler is that i've combined it with my blood results and this actually comes from an awesome startup that i've recently become a customer i've become an affiliate of because i've been so happy with the results in fact if you go to danchez.com slash superpower i believe it or not 200 a year can you get you access the blood work that gives you all the different biomarkers to be able to track how well you're doing in your ultimate health goals but also gives you pre-screenings for a bunch of different things that could go wrong later if not taken care of today. It's probably the cheapest way to actually get the blood work done. Even I've gone and tested it and looked at other providers and $200 a month is a freaking steal. But it's also awesome because I get this lab results that I could just upload to ChatGPT. And now every time I have a conversation with ChatGPT about my health, it takes all my blood work and all those biomarkers into account, helping me optimize for my goals of trying to get those numbers in the right place. Bring some down, push some up.
Speaker: it's helping me push my fitness journey forward and it's gotten to the point where i've actually started setting up projects for everything now i have projects for my home yes i have projects that talk about like the type of home that i live in how many stories it has the hvac the electricity the water what the water is like and the plumbing and all that different stuff so that every time i have conversations about the roof or maintenance things that i need to have detail i just set this one up now it's so much easier to have it because it has all the basic context loaded into that instruction area of the project and I can upload other docs here to make it more relevant about the home warranty and all that kind of stuff too but for work you can actually set up different projects for different maybe areas that you manage like I have one set up for this podcast AI driven marketer pre-production have a whole process I run through I have one set up for a new book I'm working on of course I had one set up for the book that I just launched own the show with Ken Freire which you can find it oh it's own the dot show check out the book we put it all out there for free But I used a project in order to do a lot of the pre-planning on it and the strategy behind the book and even helping me do the packaging of it and all the different stuff to get it on Amazon. I had conversations with here. Why? Because it has all the context of what I'm trying to accomplish. It makes it easier because ChatGPT has all the different context it needs in order to push this project forward. Now, in a few months, I'll probably archive this one. And let it go because this was a temporary project. But I have plenty ones in here of different things that I'm working on all the time or just areas that will never go away. Like I have a project for faith. I have a project for my LinkedIn post. have a project for couple different businesses that I'm running as well as this podcast. So in 2026, start using ChatGPT strategically by organizing different areas of your work, different areas of your life, and different areas that are big projects you're working on into ChatGPT projects so that you can give it the context it needs. Let me show you one more thing that's making the biggest difference. And I'll show you in a project that I set up called Cars because I just set this one up yesterday.
Speaker: So just walked through this process again. Every first project should be kicked off with one conversation. And that conversation's goal is to create the ah project instructions that I told you were so important.
Speaker: important Remember, if we come back to the folder in the upper right-hand corner hidden here is project instructions where you can load these instructions. ChatGPT can help you create the instructions. Just make sure that's the goal of the of the first conversation within the project. Say, hey, I'm starting a new project about, in this case, my cars. And I want you to help interview me about the details you need to know about my cars in order to create project instructions that give you the proper context for all future conversations we have about my cars. So that you can help me maintain them, you can help me fix them and help me understand going on before I even give it off to a mechanic so I know what I'm getting into and can sound like I actually know something, which I don't. But with Chachapiti, I now do. That way every conversation moving forward has all the context it needs about the two cars I drive, how many miles they are, where I got them from, how many owners they've had, like the maintenance that I've had on them done, the problems I've had with them, so that every new conversation isn't starting over from scratch. It already has the basics covered. That and when it's in a project, it now has much better ability to remember past conversations. So if if i talk to it again about an oil change, it knows that I'll talk to it about an oil change about this time this year. So there you have it. Start organizing your life into ChatGPT projects and watch your goals move forward at a faster pace because AI is going to help you get there faster because it has the context it needs when it needs it.