Section C4 · Thirty minutes that pay forever
Memory: the setup guide
The Memory block of the manual explains what the kinds of memory are. This page is the other question, the one the group has asked since day one: what do I actually do? Answer: about thirty minutes of setup, once, in this order.
Step 1: switch memory on and introduce yourself (5 minutes)
Every major chat app now has a memory setting. Find it, turn it on, then tell it the basics you are tired of repeating: family shape, work, town, the things you are usually working on. From then on every conversation starts warm. While you are in the settings, also decide the privacy question deliberately: there is a toggle for whether your chats train future models. Set it the way you actually want, not the way it arrived.
Step 2: one project per standing job (10 minutes)
Apps offer projects or spaces: containers with their own instructions and files. Make one for each recurring job in your life: the school admin one, the work-reports one, the trip-planning one. Give each a short written brief ("you help me with X; always do Y; never do Z"). This is the difference between hiring a new temp every morning and having staff who know the drill.
Step 3: keep a context file (10 minutes to start)
A single page of plain text about your world: who is who, what matters, ongoing situations. Keep it somewhere easy, update it when life changes, paste it in when a conversation needs the full picture. Unglamorous, transformative. This is also the seed of the fancier setups: the members here running full second brains (a folder of notes the AI can read directly) all started with one page like this.
Step 4: hand over between sessions (1 minute per session)
Before closing a long working chat: "summarise where we got to and what is next, so I can paste it into a fresh session." That one habit defeats the context-window wall and cuts your fuel bill at the same time.
The cautions
Memory is not perfect recall: it keeps impressions, not transcripts, and it occasionally keeps the wrong impression; review what it has remembered now and then and prune. The always-watching context tools (the ones that observe your screen to learn your life) can be genuinely magical and are also the biggest privacy trade in this manual; read what they collect before inviting one in. And no memory feature fixes the date problem: the machine still does not know what day it is unless you tell it.