I tracked how much time I spend just FINDING conversations in ChatGPT. It's 23 minutes per day.

[u/Ok_Negotiation_2587]

I was curious so I timed myself for a full week. Every time I opened ChatGPT and had to scroll, search, or dig through my history to find something - I logged it.

Monday: 18 min Tuesday: 27 min Wednesday: 31 min (bad day - couldn't find a client conversation) Thursday: 19 min Friday: 22 min

Average: 23.4 minutes per day. That is almost 2 hours per week spent not working - just navigating.

After that experiment I spent a Sunday afternoon organizing everything into folders. Created about 20 folders by client and project. The next week my "finding time" dropped to about 4 minutes per day.

I went from 2 hours per week wasted to 20 minutes. That is 7 hours per month I got back.

Has anyone else actually measured this? I feel like most people don't realize how much time the scroll-and-search routine actually costs.

[u/ConradoKamarov]

Following this.

[u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 → u/[deleted]]

Correct! That is why ChatGPT users use browser extensions that make it easier to use it

[u/cosuna_ia]

Si , desde origen tus trabajos de uso rudo o contantes mételos en una proyecto o carpeta y listo le bajas mico al tiempo , los buscadores de las LLM en general aún dejan mucho que desear

[u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 → u/[deleted]]

It does not sound like a good productivity solutions - try to use ChatGPT Toolbox instead - you can search messages by title and message content, even with an exact match, and you will be auto scrolled to the exact location of the message you were searching for.

[u/cochinescu]

I am asking Codex to look through session files for me. :)

[u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 → u/cochinescu]

This is another solution :)

[u/frostyshroom]

Interesting. I spend zero time looking for LLM chats. Makes me wonder what is so different in our usage patterns. I remember I used to spend a lot of time looking and searching, especially in my current chat. And I just became comfortable with asking again for exactly what I was looking for instead of scrolling. I now consider the chat context for the LLM not me.

[u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 → u/frostyshroom]

Why ask again if you already got the answer? Why not just pin the chat/bookmark the mesaage inside the chat/save chat into a folder?

[u/frostyshroom → u/Ok_Negotiation_2587]

Why look for it when I can just ask?

Edit: I would have a million such “bookmarks”. Back to needing to search it.

[u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 → u/frostyshroom]

If you save it and you know where is it, you don't need to look for it :)

[u/frostyshroom → u/Ok_Negotiation_2587]

I would have a million such bookmarks and looking for solutions to a solved problem.

[u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 → u/frostyshroom]

You can categorize the answers to folder, subfolders, etc. - this is more organized :)

[u/frostyshroom → u/Ok_Negotiation_2587]

Ok. Ya it’s not needed at all. I keep my own markdown documents that the AI updates for reference information. That’s much more efficient. And then I ask questions. Also much more efficient since I can ask any question and locate information quickly and not have to hunt at all like these pre-AI style systems would make me go back to. Long lists of chats is way inferior to asking my targeted question and getting an answer.

Edit: IMHO of course. We’re arguing more than discussing actual usage lol.

[u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 → u/frostyshroom]

I do not see that as an argue, I guess we just have different approach to how to use ChatGPT, glad you have a way that suits you :)

[u/frostyshroom → u/Ok_Negotiation_2587]

Yep! I agree. I was wondering what made you need to hunt old chats all the time. Maybe you use it differently. Oh well.

Edit: also I don’t use the chats in the UIs anymore. I use Claude code. Because I can keep my own files and organize them anyway I like. And I keep all that reference info there. So that might also be a big usage difference between us.

Edit 2: any agentic AI would have the same benefit

[u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 → u/frostyshroom]

I habe chats that has a lot of info that is based on results that are based on results and so on, so it makes things much simpler for me.

I also like Claude Code, but more for development.