If you’ve spend any meaningful time inside ChatGPT—brainstorming ideas, planning schedules, organizing your thoughts—you’ve probably felt the friction of having to move all that work into a separate tool afterward. But what if you didn’t have to? What if ChatGPT, apart from helping you tackle your projects and tasks, could also help you manage them?
With a bit of creative use of the available in-app features, I’ve made ChatGPT do just that. Here’s 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 sounds, and more powerful than you’d expect
About a year ago, I was experimenting with ChatGPT, trying out different prompts to make it behave in interesting ways. I found that just by using its custom instruction and memory functionality, you could transform ChatGPT into a basic project management system. Here’s the previous guide for additional context on how the system worked.
How I Transformed ChatGPT Into a Project Management System
Use ChatGPT to track and manage your tasks.
Essentially, in the custom instruction, you 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 its memory so you can access them through a new chat—not necessarily having to revisit the original one.
That old system was very bare-bones, though. While it handled the core of a project management system, it lacked many useful features we’ve come to expect from modern tools. Thankfully, OpenAI has been updating ChatGPT over the months, and it now has some impressive features—Projects, Tasks, Canvas, and collaboration features. Used together, these can turn ChatGPT into a full-fledged PMS.
Using ChatGPT Projects as a dedicated place to house your tasks
One project, one prompt, and your entire workflow is live
I don’t think OpenAI, when they introduced the Projects feature in ChatGPT, thought about using it like a PMS. It was more like a dedicated place to store similarly themed ongoing chats, or simply for organizational reasons. The main draw of Projects is that each one can have its own custom instructions, memory, and file attachments—and we can repurpose this to build the PMS workflow.
Simply create a new Project and enter this as the 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, every time you start a discussion inside 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 prompt you to add a new task or project.
These projects and tasks are automatically saved to the project memory, so they persist across your chats. You don’t have to save a chat or revisit it to remember all your ongoing projects and tasks that you’ve set up.
In practice, you can have just a single ChatGPT Project, upload this prompt, and treat it like your main PMS. Alternatively, you can spin up multiple PMS instances for specific aspects of your life—work, personal, learning—for better, more granular management.
Remember to configure the Project with “Default” access to your ChatGPT Memory. If you confine the memory settings to “Project-Only”, it will not be able to store your tasks to its global Memory, which is what we need to persistently access all our tasks across chats.
Using ChatGPT Tasks to remind you about upcoming project deadlines
ChatGPT has a secret ‘reminder’ feature
ChatGPT by default, doesn’t have a built-in reminder system, but it does have a feature called Tasks that I’ve repurposed for notifications when something is due. By default, Tasks allow you to schedule a prompt to go off at a particular time. Once that Task has executed, it sends you a notification on your phone or email—depending on how you’ve configured it. You can check the notification system by heading into Settings > Notifications > Tasks.
I’ve configured the custom prompt to automatically create a ChatGPT scheduled Task when it notices an item is marked as high priority and also has a deadline.
In my experience, though, sometimes it doesn’t automatically create a new scheduled Task. This is most likely to happen when you’ve a really 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 explicitly prompt ChatGPT to create the scheduled Task as well:
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’s a cap of 10 active tasks at a time. I actually like the constraint—it forces me to prioritize instead of dumping 30 tasks in and pretending I’ll get to all of them. If I can’t fit something into 10 active reminders, it probably shouldn’t be high priority right now.
That said, if you just like getting updates on your current tasks, even if they are not “high priority”, you can potentially set up a single repeating Task and configure it to send you an email every morning with your daily agenda. You can also configure the custom instructions to update the task every time you add new projects or tasks, so that it always stays relevant.
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Using ChatGPT Canvas to help you visualize your workloads
One prompt turns your task list into a color-coded, sortable table
Up to this point, everything is still text-based. You ask ChatGPT to show your tasks, and it gives you a formatted list in the chat. That works, but it doesn’t feel like a project management tool. You can easily change that by 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 renders right there inside Canvas with Live Preview. It looks and behaves like a dashboard you’d expect from a dedicated PM app.
Here’s the prompt I use inside 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.
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Using ChatGPT to collaborate on a project
The more, the merrier
Everything I’ve described so far works great if you’re managing your own projects. But the moment you need input from someone else—a colleague, a partner, a friend helping you plan a trip—a solo ChatGPT setup hits a wall. Fortunately, ChatGPT now supports two levels of collaboration depending on what you need.
If you’re working with a team and on the ChatGPT Team plan, you can share an entire project with all your team members. Everyone in that shared project sees the same memory, the same uploaded files, the same custom instructions. It’s a shared workspace in the truest sense—anyone can start a new chat inside the project and ChatGPT pulls from the same context.
For lighter collaboration—say you’re planning a vacation with a friend or need quick input on one 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 your discussion from there. It’s not the smoothest workflow, but it works with a little effort, and it’s definitely not a deal-breaker.
If you start a group chat, the people you bring over will not be able to access the items stored in ChatGPT’s Memory, as it’s protected for privacy reasons. You should ideally 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 there you have it—the entire manual on how I transformed ChatGPT into a project management system. Now, this was particularly to showcase how you can bend and shape large language models with access to specific tools in creative ways. A proper PMS that’s designed from the ground up for task management is probably still going to feel more intuitive to use.
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