How to Use ChatGPT Computer History (Step-by-Step)

From the video's captions, lightly corrected. [unclear] marks audio we could not make out.

1. 0:00

   Hey there everyone. In this video I want to show you about a hidden feature inside ChatGPT on the desktop app that I don't think a lot of people know about and that I get a lot of use out of.

2. 0:11

   It's called Computer History. And what Computer History does is once you've enabled it, it automatically watches all the work you do on your computer and it summarizes it into a timeline of activity. And sometimes even ChatGPT will use that timeline of activity to show you skills and recommendations that after it watched you, it thought, hey, you should probably codify this into a skill or you should probably put this into a routine. So a lot of benefit there. I want to show you where it is. So let's go ahead and get started.

3. 0:44

   The first thing you're going to want to do is have a fresh downloaded version of the ChatGPT desktop app and you're going to want to navigate to the bottom left hand corner. Click on your profile picture if you have one. Navigate to settings and then in the top search bar of settings, you can type in Computer History.

4. 1:03

   Now when you click Computer History, it will probably not look like this. It might look like Computer History off and for you to see this view right here, you'll have to have it on for a little while. So you're just going to click the toggle on. You're going to go through all of the different permissions that you would need to go through because this is going to be perpetually watching what you do. And what it's going to be doing is just going to be making these

5. 1:27

   little timeline views where you can see just this morning, it says product follow up and YouTube idea. You reviewed active product and email work, then drafted a YouTube video idea and ChatGPT screen recording and work logging. It reads a little weird, but it shows you what kind of apps you were working with and any kind of suggestions.

6. 1:46

   Now you can see last evening, we have some QA that I was doing on an app. What we were doing is we were flipping between visual references and we were figuring things out and it thought, okay, we can probably create a skill from that. Why don't you create a mobile QA issue logging skill? Now I'm not going to do that right now, but that is something that it will do is suggest skills.

7. 2:08

   I would recommend that you go through and review your timeline maybe once a week.

8. 2:14

   Now another thing, once you have it, you can actually ask it questions. So just like other plugins, you can invoke it specifically with the @Computer History skill and ask it a question. So we're going to go ahead and ask at this.

9. 2:28

   I have absolutely no clue what it's going to come back with, but you can say, "Computer history, where am I being ineffective and what should I be using AI for instead?" Now while it's working there, I'll talk through another way that I use it.

10. 2:39

    I have a scheduled task which you can find on the left hand sidebar here and you can click scheduled tasks and create one. And what I do is I say, "Hey, every day at the end of the workday around five o'clock, I want you to create a mini calendar that's just for me." And it contains my entire daily work log. And then I also want you to email that to me so that I can

11. 3:03

    have a running log of context less so for me, more so for my other AI agents like Claude and things like that who may not have this feature. So I can have that context be exposed to them so they can see what I've been working on.

12. 3:16

    Now it's been a little bit scary sometimes because you'll look at Claude and you'll ask it a question and you say, "How did you know I was working on that?" And then you remember, "Oh, I set up ChatGPT Computer History." So anyways, that's one way that I've been using it.

13. 3:30

    What you have to do is tell it to do that inside the chat, set up a scheduled task to do that, and then it will go through and do that. Now of course you need your calendar connected as well to do it.

14. 3:40

    But let's go ahead and let it finish here and I can show you what it looks like once you've asked the questions about it.

15. 3:44

    Alright, so it looks like it came back here and you can see that it has some pretty well informed information here.

16. 3:50

    It says, "My strongest read, you're spending too much attention supervising AI assisted work. You frequently remain the project manager, tester, messenger, and person checking whether anything actually finished." Okay, roast me ChatGPT please.

17. 4:08

    So where you're losing effectiveness? Repeated status checking. Consolidate those checks into one report. What changed, what's verified, what's blocked, and what needs your decision? That's good. I like that.

18. 4:18

    Second thing, refining outreach before getting enough market feedback. Run a defined experiment. Maybe I'll do like a scheduled task to run a defined experiment on the outbound cold emails that I do, because we test some different product offers and we're figuring out what works.

19. 4:32

    Not bad. Review workflows without a clear stopping rule. Maybe investigate specific failure modes such as cancellations, reschedulings, duplicate reminders, and time zones. I require evidence for findings and define when review is complete.

20. 4:46

    Like you get the idea here. It's got good suggestions here. They're informed suggestions. Now, this is just a very basics of

21. 4:53

    what you can do with this. And it's something maybe you could create a scheduled task to update a site for you that has your weekly working trends and you can start to see what's happening over time. That would be one way to use this.

22. 5:07

    And if you've got your calendar getting updated with the context of what you're doing in the days, maybe you would just be good leverage for the rest of your agents.

23. 5:15

    So anyways, wanted to show you this feature. Not a lot of people know about it. It's something that I find use out of kind of in the background. It's not something that's really in the forefront of my day, but it does give my context. So hopefully you enjoy this.

24. 5:26

    Drop a like and subscribe if you like this kind of content. And please comment. Let me know what you'd like to see more of. Thank you very much.