Guide
ChatGPT forgets context in a new chat? How to carry it over
The old chat knew everything: the client, the constraints, the three things that didn't work. The new chat knows none of it. Here's how to move that context across, and how to stop having to.
What a new chat knows
A new ChatGPT chat starts with your custom instructions and what memory has kept about you, plus the Project's instructions and files if you're in one. Memory picks up facts and preferences. It doesn't keep the working detail of a long chat: the exact constraints, the dead ends, the version you settled on. That's what goes missing.
The quick fix: a handoff note
Before you leave a long chat, ask it to write the brief for the next one:
Write a handoff note for a new chat. Include:
- what we're working on and who it's for
- decisions made, with the reason for each
- what we tried that didn't work
- open questions and the next step
Plain text, under 200 words. Leave out anything we dropped.Paste that at the top of the new chat. Asking for reasons and dead ends matters: without them, the new chat suggests the thing you already ruled out.
Keep it in a Project
If you keep doing handoffs for the same work, make it a Project. Put the handoff note in its files or instructions, and start new chats inside it. With project memory, chats in the same Project can also draw on each other, so the next chat picks up more of where the last one ended.
Update the note when something changes. A Project with last month's decisions gives last month's answers.
What memory does and doesn't carry
Memory is good for things that stay true: your role, your preferences, recurring names. It's not built to hold the state of a piece of work, and it keeps what you said, not what changed since. When memory fills up or gets things wrong, see what to do when ChatGPT memory is full and why AI memory goes stale.
Context that never was in ChatGPT
A lot of what you re-explain didn't happen in any chat: the call where the client changed the scope, the email with the new deadline. No handoff note has it unless you write it up yourself.
Cachejay writes it up for you. It keeps your calls, what you read and wrote on your Mac, and a page per project with what's decided and open. ChatGPT can read it as a connector on Business, Enterprise and Edu (read-only on Pro), and Codex can on any plan. Then a new chat starts with “where are we with Acme?” instead of a pasted brief. Setup: Cachejay for ChatGPT.
The full set of options: how to stop pasting context into ChatGPT and how to give ChatGPT context about your work.