Unlocking the Full Potential of ChatGPT Projects

So today's topic is how we can use projects better. What I'm going to do is we're going to build a project together. I'll show you how to do it step by step. And what we're going to cover in this is I'm going to go look at firstly, what on earth are projects? What are they? Why would you have projects? We'll talk a bit about the importance of custom instructions or project instructions about adding files. And then what I want to do is make it really practical and we'll build one together. I'll go through a step by step guide and then you will. If you've not already seen the power of this, then you, you will do. It's one of my favorite features and we may look at some different use cases as well. They launched projects back in November of last year, November 2024. And it was a feature that I'd been wanting for 18 months. What I wanted was some way of being able to organize my chats, but actually in November they went way beyond that. So projects are essentially, they are smart workspaces if you like. They are a place to keep your chats, to keep files, to keep instructions. And so the power of them is it allows you to stay organized, be efficient and save time. So let me just go across to ChatGPT and if you are listening on the podcast, then I will try to explain everything. But you might want to come to YouTube if you're a visual person. Projects. Firstly, you do need to have a paid for account. It's not part of the free account yet. If you have been to my sessions on ChatGPT regularly, you'll know I am a big advocate and fan of having at least the ChatGPT plus account. It's 20 bucks a month, $20 plus tax, which I think is tiny considering all the amazing things that you can do with it and the time that you can save. There are a lot of features you get in a plus account which you don't get with the free account. The free account's great. You can do some amazing things, but you can really up your game with the plus account. Now, I don't have a plus account because we've gone to the next level. We have a teams account. Everybody in our business has the teams account. So that's what I'm on right now. It is the teams account and what you will find is on the left hand side, underneath your GPTs and above your chats is an area that has got these little folders. This is your projects and projects are partly we can think of as a folder to store things, which is really useful. One of the things we can do is you can start organizing by moving your existing chats. So if you go to your chats, any old chat, so let me just pick one random. If I took a chat, I can click on the three dots and you now have, as well as being able to rename the chat or archive or delete it, you have the you have add to project. So you can move your existing chats into projects. So you group them all together. Think of it as a folder in Dropbox or whatever system you use for your filing system. So that's the first thing we can do. We can move our existing chats into projects to keep them organized. And also the other way around, we can take things out of projects. So if we go into a project, you will see in your projects you now have your chats that you've put into a project. And for each of these chats, if you click on the three dots to the far, you have the ability to move it to a different project or remove from the project and put it back in general chat. So it's very easy to move your existing chats around into projects, out out of projects or into different projects. That's one of the things I like about it is just this ability to now organize. Because I'm a heavy user of ChatGPT and I use it, I start new chats every single day. And I was finding that what I was having to do was before November 2024 was what I would have to do is on a weekly basis I would go through my chats and start to either delete them, archive them, or rename them. Because when you create a chatgpt gives it a name. And sometimes that name's useful, but sometime not. And so I was coming up with naming conventions so I could identify particular types of chats easily. They did help us because they brought in the search facility a little sometime mid last year. So you can now search, which is really useful, but much better. Now they've given us these projects so we can just organize things better, but they've gone much further. Projects is way more than simply organizing things. They're smart workspaces. So what we can do in a project like this one that I got here, as well as organizing all of our chats, which you can see in the bottom half, we also have an area called project files. And in this particular one there are eight files I've got loaded and instructions. So let me Describe both of those quickly. Instructions. If you're familiar with custom instructions, then this is similar to custom instructions. Custom instructions is your systems prompt that you set up. That is the instructions for all of your chats. Custom instructions is really powerful. It's where you can specify things like who you are, who is your audience, what's your writing style, and that will apply your custom instructions to all chats. Really useful. Strongly recommend that you set those up. Project instructions is very similar. It's another level of systems prompt, if you like, that applies to any chat that you start in inside a project. So this means that when you have a project you can set some instructions. It may be that in a particular project you always want it to use a particular writing style or you always want to output in a particular way. It may be a specific format. Perhaps you always want in a project, anything that you do, you want to put it in a new canvas. So we can specify in the project instructions how we want it to behave inside that particular project. And so you can have different instructions, different ways that your the chat behaves inside different types of projects. So that's the instructions. Then we have the project files. And so as you can upload files into a chat and that's really useful. You could upload a CSV file, you could upload Word documents, PDF documents, images and so on. But before we had projects, you would have to upload them every time you started a brand new chat. What we can do now in a project is we can figure out what are the most important files, what's the most important information that we have to give ChatGPT within this project, and it will then have access to those files every time you start a brand new chat, you do not have to upload them each time when you start a new chat. And we're going to look at an example of how you do that. That's a quick overview of projects. Let's build one. There are so many things we can use projects for, so many use cases. I've got dozens of different projects. If you look at, I've got projects for both business and personal. I have projects for things like health and fitness, where it's got all sorts of information about my personal health, about my medical records and I track my progress, things like body mass, composition and so on. It has all that data. So if ever I want to ask questions and get some health insights, then it's got all my data inside that project. I have projects for the business, for strategic planning. So I have a business where I can do planning for the business. And it's already got things like my business plan, my SWOT analysis, It knows all about the business. It's in the project file. So every time I want to start a new chat and do some strategic thinking, I just go to that project. One that I use most frequently is copywriting. Whenever I want to write a marketing material, like for example, the synopsis summary for this particular live stream, this was written inside my copywriting project. In fact, I've just done the copy for the next live stream, which we'll be doing in two weeks time. In fact, let me show it to you. So I have the copywriting project and in here it's got custom instructions or project instructions. And it's got various project files in here giving examples of the format of different types of copy, one of which is how I lay out my live stream copy. And so if I just click on the chat, this is the very latest one that will be the next live stream. I'm going to look at the seven costly mistakes we make with ChatGPT. I'm going to go through seven things that we tend to do wrong with ChatGPT that we can improve next time around. All of my copy is always consistent because it's been trained in the project files. Okay, so that's enough about use cases. Let's do something practical. Let's build one. Let's build one. And what we're going to do is the first thing you do is you go to where you can find your projects. You will see it says new project. So we simply just hit new project and we give the project a name. So let's think about something that owners of accounting firms would probably do fairly regularly. I guess you have to do marketing of some sort. So why don't we create a project for our marketing now over time, as you get more sophisticated, you might want to break this down to different projects. You might have projects for social media marketing, which is different to a project for doing blog posts and articles. Let's create a marketing project. And so we could just call it marketing. I'm going to call it marketing demo just for now because I will delete this afterwards. And then we just hit create project. So that's the first step. Let's just give it a name. And it's doing that. Let me just close the sidebar as well. And we could just simply start chatting. There's nothing else you need to do at this stage. If all you want to do is organize chats into one place, then you can get Started straight away, you'll see that it's got, right at the top it says new chat in marketing demo. So we start our chats inside the project, and that means it will automatically be filed there. But if you do that, you're missing out on some of the real power of projects. The real power of projects is the instructions and uploading files. So let's do that. Let's create some instructions. What we do is we click on the instructions and what we want to do here, what we need to do is tell it the project instructions, the custom instructions. This is the systems prompt. And you could keep it really simple. It gives you an example here it says respond in Spanish. Reference. The latest JavaScript documentation. Keep answers short and focused. And so something like that might be sufficient. However, we know from prompt engineering that one of the keys is specificity. The more specific we are, the more clear we are. Then we will tend to get better results, more consistent results, the results that we're expecting. And so there are a number of elements of things that I would recommend that you build into your project instructions, for example, giving it a Persona. We know from prompt engineering that when we ask ChatGPT to play a role, we get a better answer because by default it's a helpful assistant. And as a helpful assistant, it's really good. But if, let's say you want a project for analyzing financial data, and you ask ChatGPT to play the role of a financial accountant skilled in analyzing financial data, the sort of response that you would get would be the response that you would expect from a financial accountant. It'd be more nuanced, more detailed. So when we create our project instructions, we want to make sure we include elements that will get us a better result. And the way that I do that is I've built a standard prompt that does that really easily. And so let me just go across for a second too. If you've been to my sessions regularly, you'll know I'm a big fan of having prompt templates, standard prompts that you can reuse over and over again. And I'm also a big fan of organizing somewhere so that you can grab the prompts that you want. In other words, having a prompt library is what I call it. And you should definitely start collecting prompts, having a way to organize them, a prompt library. And some people organize their prompt libraries in notion, some people in Trello, some people in Airtable. I've created my own software for doing exactly this because it makes life even easier still. And so what I'm going to do is there are. I've written over a hundred prompts specifically for the owners of accounting firms and business owners. And one of the prompts, if I just type in project, I have a project file setup prompt. So I'm just going to grab this prompt. Here's the prompt control V. So I've got a prompt here that I'm going to run. It's quite a long prompt. And the purpose of this prompt is it will build out my project instructions and also another document called the project overview. Let me run this prompt and we'll see what it does. So it's asking me for some information about what's this project all about. And so all we need to do is feed it some information, what's the project about, and then it's going to go and create my project instructions. And so to save you watching me type, I thought about this earlier, wrote it down, I'm going to copy and paste it. So it's asking for what's the project about? What are the main goals, the objectives? What are we trying to do inside this project? Who's the target audience? Are there any special requirements? And also list the project files. So I've done that and what I've put for this project. As you can see here, this project is for creating marketing material and promotional articles for our accounting firm. The main goal is to create great copy that addresses the pain points and wants of our ideal clients. The target audience are the owners of small businesses, in particular plumbing businesses. We have included our detailed customer avatar files in the project files. We will include the following project files, a client Persona, success stories, testimonials. So there's some spelling mistakes there. I'm just giving it an idea of what I want to create. And from that is going to create two documents. It's going to create the project overview inside of Canvas. The project overview is something I like to create. It's a more detailed version of what the project does, which I will turn to a separate document and feed it as a file. In other words, this means that the project, every time I use it, it knows exactly what I'm trying to do inside this project. So I would review that and change it where necessary. And what it also does, if I go down to here, that's the project overview and it's also just finishing up. It also creates the project instructions. So let's have a look at these project instructions. It says here, role you are a marketing copy strategist with a deep understanding of small business psychology, especially trades people like Plumbing business owners. Your unique skills include audience specific messaging, persuasive copywriting, testimonial integration, avatar alignment. I want it to use Canvas for all draft developments. Canvas is what we can see on the right hand side where it puts the chat on the left and the output on the right. I use Canvas for most things and then it also specifies the project files that I'm going to use. So I'm going to have a project overview which it wrote for me and I'm going to feed it some other files which I've listed here. So what I would do is having got your project instructions, I would just copy this. If you're happy with it, you can edit it. If it's not quite right, you can edit it, you can change it and then we can copy it. And what we can now do is I can close that down and go back to the project. Let me just go back to the side here. It's marketing demo. So we're just going to add instructions and I can paste that in there. Okay, so we've got the role, we're telling ChatGPT in this project, you are a marketing copy strategist and we've got, we're telling it all this instructions, the output format, always use Canvas and we're telling it about project files. Ok, let me save that. So then what we have to do is give it the files if it's marketing the sorts of things that you might want to create. So one of the files I like to give is a project overview which is a little bit more detail than the instructions themselves that really describes the project. What are the key objectives? What's the problem statement? What are we trying to solve with marketing? And that was all done in that prompt. So this doesn't take me long to do. I just put it into a document so I can upload that into the project. If you're collecting testimonials, if you've got a file of testimonials, which I really recommend that you do, keep all your testimonials in one place and then what you can do is you can put your testimonials in a document into a project file. If you fed it the testimonials you've got as you create things like the words for your website, creating a brochure, creating an email, creating a landing page, then it will pick out appropriate testimonials. It's got them already built into the project, linked to that. Even better still is you should be collecting success stories. So if you've got success Stories, clients that you've helped, and they've got great results, then record those and put those into your project as well, because you'll use those in your marketing. Another thing that you should have, if it's marketing, is you'll definitely want to have a customer avatar or client Persona, whichever term you prefer. And in other words, you want to make sure that you are clear. What are the frustrations and pain points of your ideal customer? What are their demographics? What are their psychographics? What do they want in life? What are their fears? What keeps them awake at night? And so I've created this one for plumbing businesses. It's a detail customer avatar, and you should create customer Personas and avatars for all your main types of client. And the reason for that is when you're doing marketing, when you're writing things like an ebook, you're writing the pages for your website, you're writing emails, you want to make sure that the words you use, the copy is speaking to your specific type of clients, that you are addressing their pain points, their challenges. Because when you do that, they're going to take notice, they're going to think, oh, crikey, this accountant understands me. When it comes to marketing, having detailed insights into your ideal clients is really powerful. There are many different project documents that you could put in. You could put in examples of how you write your social media posts, your Facebook posts. If your marketing project was going to also be writing your blog posts for you, you might create a file with some example blog posts and you feed that into your projects. I showed you mine for creating livestream copy fed in there, the examples and templates of exactly how I wanted to write live stream copy as opposed to website copy, or, sorry, webinar copy as opposed to different types of copy. So these are all the sorts of things you can put into your projects. And all you need to do is. If I go back to ChatGPT, all you have to do is get those projects and you can simply just drag them in and I've got them on. Let me just do exactly that. And it's now uploading into the project. Just drag them into the right place. It's where it says add files. I should have clicked there first. It's now adding the four project files. So it's always got access to these. Going forward, it knows who my ideal customer is. If I'm an accountant, specialize in plumbing business, it's got my success stories, it's got my testimonials, it's got all this information and this is all about feeding it with context. If you followed my training on prompt engineering, one of the things you'll know is that context is so powerful when you are creating prompts. The more context, the more background information you can give to the AI, the better the results that you will get. And this is just a great way of feeding context that it can use every single time. So having done that, now let's now use this project. Let's do something with it. And so it might be that. Imagine that you want to write a blog post article and let me just grab a prompt. So let's start a brand new chat. I've got. Write a 500 word. Write a 500 word blog post about the importance of having a cash flow forecast include a relevant success story about one of our clients. Okay. Now normally I would say that's a really bad prompt and it is a pretty bad prompt because we're not giving it any context. We've not told it who is our ideal client. We've not told it our writing style. There's lots of information that we should be giving to get a better result. But even with a fairly poor prompt like that, as you're about to see, we'll still get a reasonable result because it knows the instructions. So it already knows that it's playing the role of a marketing copy strategist. We don't have to tell it that in the prompt because it's got that in the instructions and it's also got access to project files. So let's see what it does with this particular prompt. So you might have noticed it did very briefly say analyzing files. So that's one of the things that tells us that it is looking at the files that we've put in. And if we go over to the left hand side, it's then telling us, here's a draft blog post and it's putting it in a canvas because we said that in the instructions. And so it's done exactly that and it's writing our blog post here. And if we go back to here, let's just. I won't read it all, but it says why every plumbing business needs a cash flow forecast. So look, it's. If your ideal target market is plumbing businesses, it's put that into the title. We didn't tell it that in the prompt because it was a poor prompt, but it knows that because we fed it into the instructions and we've put in the customer avatar. Running a plumbing business is tough work. Between emergency call outs, staff scheduling and managing supplies. There isn't always time to step back and look at the bigger financial picture. But if there's one tool that can change everything for business owners like John and Mike, our typical client Personas, I would actually change that. I wouldn't put that in there. It's a simple cash flow forecast. And it's going on to talk about the importance of cash flow problems in plumbing businesses and what a cash flow forecast will do. It's then got a success story. So Blue Pipe Plumbing Co. Tom, owner of Blue Pipe Plumbing Co. Had built a solid reputation. It goes on to say some months I didn't know if I'd make payroll. He admitted it was like playing financial whack a mole, which is interesting. So where's he got all that from? In the project files we gave it success stories. And the very first one is the success story, the case study with Tom, the owner of Blue Pipe Plumbing. And so it's taken that success story and it's changed some of the wording so it fits the blog post. So it's the same success where that he talks about in the success story. It's taken that story, it's reworded it in a way that will fit with this particular blog post, which I think is really amazing. That saved a lot of time. And then it's then got a call to action. Let us show you how. Book a no pressure call and get clarity on your cash flow today. And it's even ended with a great little testimonial as well. The sound bite, where's it got that from? Again? It's taken it from the project file. So hopefully you're starting to see now that if you want to do, let's say marketing, it's much easier once you've built a project and you've given it information. Likewise, if you want to do, let's say financial analysis, perhaps you want to create a, a financial report at the end of everybody's financial year end. It may be that you could have in your projects a file of how you want to structure and specify a year end financial analysis report, for example. So let's do something else. Let me try a completely different prompt. In fact, let's do this. Let's stay in the same prompt. So we're doing our blog post. You've written a blog post. Let's say you're happy with it. One of the things that you might want to do when you publish your blog post is you might want to have a little thumbnail image. I did a session recently on the new AI image generation in ChatGPT, which is pretty extraordinary. So let's now say create a thumbnail image for this blog post, make it photorealistic and include one of our testimonials from a plumbing firm as well as the title of the blog post. Again, this is not a great prompt at all. If you've done my training course on how to do a use AI image generation, I talk about how to create prompts for getting consistent images. But nevertheless, even with that, as you will soon see, we'll get a pretty good image that we can use with this blog post. Now, if you've used the image generation, it's not super fast like everything else. This will probably take a little while. So while it's doing that, what we might do, for example, is perhaps you want to send out an image email to your ideal client Persona and let's say it is the owners of small plumbing firms and perhaps you've drafted an email you want to send out, but you're not really. You don't feel confident about the quality of the email. You want some ideas on how to improve the email. And so we could do exactly that. And so I've just created an email that we're going to use ChatGPT to help us improve. Let me read the email to you. I've got an email I've written. It says, worried about cash flow? Let's talk. Hi, first name. If you've ever felt the pressure of money going out faster than it comes in, you're not alone. Even profitable businesses can run into trouble if they don't manage cash flow carefully. It's one of the most common issues we see and one of the most avoidable. The truth is, cash flow problems often don't come from a lack of sales. They come from poor timing, slow paying customers, or simply not having a clear plan. That's where we come in. We help business owners understand their numbers, spot the gaps, and build a simple realistic cash flow strategy, one that gives you more control and fewer surprises. It goes on and it says book a 20 minute call and then it signs off with our name. And that's not a bad email. But perhaps we want to get ChatGPT to help us improve that email. Before we do, let's just quickly now see we do have our image and I don't know, I think this is pretty cool. We could use this with the blog post why Every Plumbing Business Needs a Cash Flow Forecast. So it's got the title of the blog post and it's also got then Our testimonial from Tom, the director of blue Pipe Plumbing Co. We now budget with confidence and have a better handle on cash flow. It's a pretty good email, pretty good image. We could perhaps use that with our blog post. So let's now go back to our marketing demo project and let's do a completely new chat. We're going to review this email and what I'm going to do first of all is go to my favourites because I have one called rewriting an email to A. So this is rewriting and improving a email. If I copy that to Clipboard, if I take my standard prompt for improving emails and I put that in here and at the end of it all I've got to do is add the email which I just read to you earlier. I'm just going to put that in there. Control C, control V. There it is. Okay, that's my prompt for reading an email, reviewing it and improving it. And what I've not done with this prompt is given it any context at all about the fact that we work with plumbing businesses. I don't have to because that's in the project file. So let's see what this does. And so firstly what it's doing is it's giving a brief summary of the client Persona, which is great because this is now telling us, it's telling me that it understands the ideal client. So the ideal client is someone like John and Mike, co owners of a small plumbing and heating business in the uk. That might not be your typical ideal client, but if it was, you'd have that in your customer Persona. It goes on then to rewrite the email, which it's doing let's fix together. And it's rewritten the email and then what it does is it's explaining why it's doing it. And this is the bit I want to really cover because it's really interesting. It says the original subject was worried about cash flow. Let's talk. It's now saying struggling with cash flow. Let's fix that together. And it then gives the reason, because struggling mirrors how tradespeople like John and Mike describe their day to day challenges. Direct and honest conveys partnership a key differentiator when they feel alone navigating business finances. And it's got the link. I don't know if you can notice, but afterwards there's the link to our client Persona that's in the project file. So it's read that Persona and it's worked out some words that would probably be more compelling to that particular type of person. Likewise with the tone. It was originally polish and professional, which is what we would probably write an email, but now the revised one uses everyday practical language like juggling quotes, getting paid on time, hold off hiring. The reason for that is because John and Mike are hands on practical thinkers. They respond better to conversational language that mirrors their world, not corporate jargon. Which is probably right. A plumber would not want the formal stuff. They want something they can relate to in terms of the language. And it goes on with other ways that we could improve that copy to better speak to our target market. So I'm hoping you're starting to see the real power now of if you've got a project, let's say for marketing, and you've given it your details of your ideal clients and their Personas, it means you're going to create so much better copy. Because ChatGPT now understands standard prompts that you can use to critique your copy to improve your copy is going to make your marketing so much more effective, helping you to attract better clients, better clients in your marketing. And we can do this in a tiny fraction of the time that we used to because of projects. Okay, let me wrap up with There are some brand new changes to projects that have come out in the last, just in the last few days. If I go back to the release notes, I think it was June 12th, which is as we're filming this live, it's six days ago. So let's just have a look at what these improvements are they have. Firstly, as you can see now, that's the GPT here we've got deep research and voice mode support. We didn't have that before. If we go back into our projects, you will see that they're expanding. Now the tools we can run deep research if you haven't used that yet, that is one of the most powerful uses of ChatGPT and that wasn't available until a few days ago. Also we have the advanced voice mode as well, which is really powerful. So what else have we got? If we go back to the release notes, they've improved memory to reference past chats. So this one's really interesting because one of the shortcomings of projects was that it didn't know what you had in other chats. Now it's suggesting here that it's going to start to memorize things in recent chats. This is only a few days ago if this is the case. This is a really powerful feature. It's only available to plus and pro users right now. And I use the teams account, so I haven't been able to test this out yet, but if it's as it rolls out to teams as well, this could be really powerful. Also, you can share chats from projects, so this is brand new. One of the downsides of projects is you couldn't share the chats with other people in your team. For example, now you can also start a new project from the chat. What that means is that if you go to an existing chat that's not in a project, then as well as being able to add it to a project, you have the option with a chat to create a new project from that chat. And finally, if you do use ChatGPT on a mobile, then you can now upload files and you can access the model selector on mobile as well. Projects has got those five updates just in the last few days, which has taken what is already an amazing feature in ChatGPT and just makes it better still. So I hope, if nothing else, I hope I've inspired you to start playing around with it. Remember, you do have to be on one of the paid plans, but I think it's absolutely worth it. Let me know what was the most valuable thing today, Let me know in the comments what that was and I will see you again online soon. Bye for now.