I firmly believe that everything can (and usually should) be organized. From your calendar, to your notes, to your closet, there is opportunity to make your life easier by being mindful of what you bring into your space and how you structure it.
A whole new domain I’ve been thinking about is AI interactions. While there are now many places that we interact with AI, including AI that’s integrated into tools we already use, today I want to focus on chat-based organization. Think of your Gemini or ChatGPT that is filled with random conversations, from work to personal life, that is difficult to navigate.
Because I’m a Googler, I’ll share organization principles from the lens of using Gemini (I’m a Google AI Pro subscriber in my personal life because I firmly believe it is the superior product), but you can apply these to your AI tool of choice.
Separating Work and Personal
If you’re using AI for work, it’s important to make sure you follow your company’s policies. Many organizations have business subscriptions for employees to AI tools that protect their privacy and data rights.
But beyond that, I find having a separate account for your work and personal life (even if you use the same tool for both like I do with Gemini) is a great way to keep yourself more broadly organized. Consider setting the theme of one to Dark and one to Light so that you instantly recognize which account you’re in without having to look at your profile.
Organize Based on Purpose of Prompt
With organizing anything, it’s helpful to consider the most common scenarios you have. Why do you start a chat? When do you need to refer back to it? I think of my conversations in 4 primary categories: random, one-off, ongoing, systemized.
Random
These are the chats that I will likely never feel the need to refer back to and that I don’t want clogging up my sidebar. For these, I use the Temporary chat feature, which archives the chat once you exit it.
One-off
These are the chats that I may want to refer back to in the future, but aren’t part of my daily or weekly workflows. Think of chats like “help me figure out the right size artwork to go over this piece of furniture” or “help me understand step by step how to effectively edit a video for a corporate audience.” These I start like typical chats and then I rename them after I’m done if I don’t think the original name captures the nature of the conversation well enough for me to search it again later.
Ongoing
These are the chats that I come back to on a regular basis, but each prompt in that chat builds upon or is slightly different then the previous prompts. For example, if I’m planning a trip, I will likely do that over weeks and maybe even months. I’ll rename the chat something like “Spring Trip 2026” or “Pitch deck outline and feedback” and then I’ll pin the chat.
This makes it easy to quickly revisit the chat, re-familiarize myself with what I already learned, and pick up where I left off. And like any good minimalist, it’s important to go back and unpin the chat once you don’t need it regularly anymore so that you make room for new chats to take its place at the top.
Systemized
These are workflows more than chats. Let’s go through an example for personal life and work.
Let’s say you love to read and want to talk to Gemini about books once you finish them (this may just be a scenario that’s going to get it’s own blog post in the coming weeks 😉). Each time you do this, you want to go through the same process of having Gemini ask you book club-like questions and then helping you draft an outline so you can write a book review for your Goodreads.
Or for work, let’s say you create presentations on a regular basis and you want help writing the speaker notes. For each presentation you want the speaker notes structured the same way and for it to follow the sales methodology of your company.
In both of these scenarios you have a repetitive set of tasks but unique inputs. These types of chats are perfect candidates to be Gems (or Custom GPTs if you’re a ChatGPT user). Each time you click on your Gem, you’ll see your recent set of chats with that Gem and I find that it makes navigating so much easier and the experience of interacting with Gemini faster.
The Next Level
The purpose of this post was purely to help you think about organizing your AI interactions. There is so much else we could go into around creating Gems (post coming soon!), adding personal context, connecting other apps, scheduling actions, and more. I’ll continue to publish my thoughts and remember, you can always ask Gemini for advice on how to use it! It is, after all, and expert on itself.
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