How do I give ChatGPT context without pasting everything?

Give it one page that says what the project is, where it stands, what has already been decided, and what happens next.

Pasting the old conversation across is not the best way, and neither is handing over a pile of files.

The bit that wastes your time

I use two assistants. One is better at writing, the other at picking apart long documents, and I move between them during the same piece of work.

For weeks that meant explaining everything twice. I would settle something with one, open the other, and start again from the beginning. One afternoon in July I caught myself telling the second assistant a decision I had made an hour earlier, and getting back a suggestion I had already rejected.

That is the shape of it. Not the assistant being poor at its job, but no single place holding what was already true.

Why a fixed order works better

An assistant reads whatever you give it. What it cannot do is work out which parts are current, which were dropped along the way, and which mattered once and no longer do.

A chat has all three mixed together. It holds the decision, the idea you abandoned an hour later, the correction, and the price that was only right on the day you checked it. You can tell those apart because you were there. The assistant treats them all the same.

When the same four things arrive in the same order every time, none of that has to be worked out. It knows where to look and starts answering.

The four things

1. What is this? Two lines.
2. Where does it stand today? The current state.
3. What has already been decided? Including what you do not want reopened.
4. What happens next? The one or two things waiting.

The third one is the one people leave out, and it saves the most. For a flat purchase it might read: not looking north of the river, the commute was tested and it does not work. Without that line, every assistant you ever speak to will helpfully suggest north of the river.

One rule keeps the page working: only what is true now. When something stops being true, it comes off. That is what lets an assistant read the page instead of interpreting it.

This part is already done

You do not have to design that page. PREP Save writes it for you.

You sign in with Google, name your project, and it creates the folder in your own Google Drive with the page already laid out and the four headings in place. You put your own words in. Nothing to install, and your files never leave your Drive.

When a session changes something, you save it and the page is updated for you, with a dated line recording what happened. So the folder keeps up without you formatting anything by hand.

Reading it back

Paid ChatGPT plans connect to Google Drive and open the file when you name it. On the free plan there is no connector at all, so you attach the file to the chat or paste the page in. Gemini lets a free Google account pick a file straight from Drive. There is more detail in can ChatGPT read files from my Google Drive.

The page is ordinary text, so every one of those routes works. To reopen a project in a new chat, the whole instruction is one line:

In my Google Drive, open the «project folder» inside PREP and read PREP.md.

What it is worth

The immediate gain is that you stop explaining the same project over and over. In my case the two assistants read the same page, so whichever one I open already knows which options were rejected and why.

The larger gain arrives later. The work stops living inside one company's chat history. A page in your own drive can be opened by ChatGPT today, by Gemini next month, by someone you hire, by whatever exists in two years.

Assistants are getting better at remembering, and that is good news. But their memory belongs to them. The page belongs to you.

The honest limit

The page is only as current as your last save. PREP Save does the writing, but it writes when you tell it to, so a folder you have not touched in a month will describe the project as it was a month ago.

It is a small habit and it takes a minute: when something changes, save it. That is the whole of the upkeep.

If you want to see the page before deciding, PREP Save makes one in your own Drive, or you can read the format itself, which is free and takes about five minutes.