Update, memory
The British entrepreneur Richard Branson has a great habit. He always carries a little notebook with him, and jots down ideas and information he comes across during the day as soon as he can. He then gives these little notebooks to one of his assistants to type up. This means he has a database of all the ideas he comes across, as well as information about the people he meets. He can meet someone he met once twenty years ago and can seem to remember all about the person and their previous conversation, whereas in reality he just read the meeting brief that his assistant made from his old notes.
Of course the idea of keeping a notebook like this isn’t original, it’s common to many successful people. Bill Gates does it too. Nabokov kept notebooks for years, but lost some of them, and so knew that his autobiography Speak, memory was flawed. In Ancient Rome high ranking officials would have a person to perform a similar role to a notebook, often a highly educated, multilingual Greek freeman. Wouldn’t that be great?
I’m not very good at remembering faces or people’s personal details, so having an ever-present assistant to whisper the stuff I had forgotten in my ear would be very useful to me. But of course, I now have a smartphone and AI that should be able to perform a similar role. So how can I make that happen?
ChatGPT now has an inbuilt memory, and it will automatically update with things it thinks it should remember, or you tell it to remember. I’ve played with it a bit and the problem with it is that it only has a single “memory bank”. I don’t want it mixing up my work stuff with personal stuff, nor do I want it to remember the things my youngest son asks it to do (mainly illustrating monsters for a science fiction story he is currently writing). Also, the memory isn’t structured. So how I can use it for the things I want to remember?
A couple of use cases I would like to have:
- remembering details about friends and acquaintances, with the AI making notes for me like Branson does after meetings.
- keeping a daily record of my exercise, so I can see progress and perhaps make charts once I have enough data.
Can I get ChatGPT to do these things?
With a bit of experimentation, I have found a way to do this, and it’s pretty neat. Let’s look at the exercise log. I use a simple prompt:
I want you to keep a log of my exercise, in CSV format. The headings of the columns are: Date, Exercise, Reps. When I tell you what exercise I have done I want you to update the table, adding the new data to the final row. Always keep the dates in chronological order. If I don’t specify a date, it’s for today. Here is an example row: Date, Exercise, Reps 2024/01/19; Press-ups; 20,21,24
That’s it. I have updated the name of the chat to add an icon so that it stands out. There is currently no way to pin chats in ChatGPT, but if I update a chat regularly it should stay near the top. Here’s what it looks like:
That’s pretty neat, right? You’ll see I have also added a “People log” - that’s to keep track of things like birthdays, partner names, etc of friends and acquaintances.
Now of course the tricky part is going to be to get into the habit of updating this regularly. I’ll keep you posted.
Update Friday 18 October 2024
So, this didn’t work as well as I had hoped. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t keep the habit, it’s that ChatGPT kept making mistakes, so I kept refining the prompts, and it still wouldn’t work well, and it is much easier to just add a line to a spreadsheet myself then tell ChatGPT to do it and then have to correct it’s errors.
I think it would have been better to do this as a GPT (I wish they would do better with their naming of things), so I’ll experiment with that sometime soon.