Getting set up without the noise

This course goes deep on the generalist desk from your tool map: ChatGPT. First, a setup lesson that ignores the noise — no feature tour, no plan-comparison agonizing — and gets you to a working, personalized starting point in one sitting. (Interface specifics here are current as of September 2026; buttons drift, the setup logic doesn't.)

Account and plan, the short version. Start on the free tier if you're new — it's enough to run every lesson in this course. Upgrade when you hit a real wall (usage limits during actual work, or a mode you reach for that isn't there), not before. Paying first and exploring second is how subscriptions outlive their usefulness.

The three settings that matter on day one. Everything else can wait; these three compound from the first conversation. One: custom instructions — move your voice guide in (you built it in Foundations; this is its home). Two: memory — as of September 2026, ChatGPT can carry facts about you between chats; decide deliberately whether that's on, and skim what it has remembered once a month, same rhythm as your promptbook audit. Three: data controls — find the training-use toggle and set it consciously; you know the questions to ask from the privacy lesson.

Learn the furniture, skip the tour. You need exactly four locations: where chats live (and that they're searchable — your old work is findable, use that); where the model/mode picker sits (your three gears from Foundations); how to start a fresh chat (new task, new chat — context from an old thread leaks into answers); and where files attach. Ten minutes of clicking covers all four. While you're there, notice the search box over your chat history — three months from now, "that answer about shipping labels" will be findable in five seconds, but only if you let chats keep descriptive first messages instead of "hey".

Where things live vs. what things are. This course will keep separating those two. What things are — asks, iterations, templates, checks — you already own from Foundations and it transfers untouched. Where things live — buttons, names, menus — changes every few months and deserves exactly as much memorization as furniture in a rented apartment. When a redesign lands, re-find your four locations and carry on.

Phone and desktop are one brain. Install the mobile app the same day — as of September 2026 your chats, instructions, and memory follow the account, so the thought you dictate in a parking lot lands in the same place as the document you'll polish at a desk. Voice input on the phone is genuinely good for capture: ramble the messy version out loud, then shape it later at the keyboard with a rewrite ask. Capture where you are, craft where you're comfortable — two halves of one workflow, not two tools.

One mistake to skip: importing someone else's "perfect setup" — a viral mega-prompt in custom instructions, seventeen browser extensions, a folder taxonomy for chats you haven't had yet. Setup earns its complexity the same way templates do: from real use, twice. Start with the three settings and four locations; let your actual work vote on the rest.