Remembering infrequent life things
If there’s a type of task I cannot stand, it’s the once-a-year task. I can never get good at them because I never get any practice. Each year there are a set of tasks that I must defeatedly return to google for re-education on. It’s humiliating.
Of these tasks, the most ridiculous is the timer for my Christmas lights. It’s perhaps the simplest tech I own, and yet by virtue of the fact I only set it once per year, I never remember how to do it.
A more pressing example is flushing my tankless water heater. Two of the selling features of a tankless water heater is they last a long time, and they save you about $300 per year in heating costs. Thing is, they only last a long time if you maintain them once per year (which conveniently costs $300 to have it done by a plumber). For this reason I am hell-bent on performing the maintenance myself, which of course I forget how to do each time.
To manage these easily forgotten tasks (and others), I have created a Memory GPT. It’s trained on anything that I need to recall, using instruction manuals or notes provided by me. This highlights a big bonus of using the custom GPT, which is that it can be trained on ultra-specific issues around my house, like where I keep the small pump that has a singular purpose.
CREATING MEMORY BOT
The instructions for this GPT won’t really make any sense or be all that interesting unless you want to get into the minutiae of general home maintenance. Instead of providing the instructions, I’ll more just provide the examples of what my memory bot is managing for me.
Water Tank
During the first maintenance visit, the plumber made it clear to me that he’d really prefer I learn how to do it, so he was quite generous with his time. He ran me through everything while I took notes. These notes are now living in a text file within my GPT, so now instead of simply reading off them, I can interact with them directly should anything be unclear (and since I took them, next to everything is unclear). Bonus point: I can even take photos of the unit and the GPT can tell me which valves do what.
Christmas Light Timer
This product takes the top prize for simplest thing I have, with the most needlessly complex set of instructions. Fortunately, they’re very short, so I have them as a PDF loaded into the GPT, and it does a great job of translating whatever the hell the author was trying to get across into plain English.
Warranty/expiration document
I have a standard text document that holds all warranties I have for things around my house, as well as expiration dates of important items like passports. It is a bit of a pain to update it when a new item arrives with a warranty, but it’s very helpful to know the status of everything at a glance.
USING MEMORY BOT
The primary challenge with Memory Bot is recalling what information it contains. The only thing that’s worked so far is having a mental check-engine light go off whenever I mutter the phrase “goddamn I don’t remember how to do that.” Should I catch myself cursing the clouds in such a way, I immediately know to check memory bot.
As I mentioned briefly, the true win here is not necessarily having the bank of information, but being able to converse with it. I’m good at taking notes, but I’m notorious for doing them too quickly and not adding enough detail. This method allows for me to ask follow-up questions, and in practice, I’ve found it typically knows exactly what past-me was trying to get across.
ALTERNATE USES
This GPT focuses on storing and recalling personalized instructions and records, acting as a digital memory assistant for tasks and information management, which can be adapted for a variety of organizational and informational retrieval applications such as:
Name to Face Machine
This GPT could serve as a tool in a business environment to help users remember people’s names and faces by storing personal details. When struggling to recall someone, users could describe the person or the context of their meeting, and the GPT would provide the name and other stored details.
Vehicle Maintenance Tracker
Similar to the car maintenance document, this GPT would track all aspects of a vehicle’s maintenance history and future needs. It could remind users of upcoming service dates, log repairs and maintenance tasks, and provide advice on common vehicle issues based on the model’s history.
Project Management Assistant
A GPT that helps users manage personal or professional projects by tracking tasks, deadlines, and progress. It could store project details, remind users of upcoming deadlines, and help prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance, acting as a personalized project management tool.
