If you use ChatGPT regularly, you may have encountered messages like:
“Your chat is full”
or
“Starting…” that never proceeds.
While refreshing the page or opening a new tab may help temporarily, these solutions often fail to fix the underlying issue. In this article, I’ll show you how to use the Project feature in ChatGPT to organize, store, and continue your conversations more reliably.
Common Problem: ChatGPT gets stuck on “Starting…”
As I wrote in a previous post, there are quick workarounds for this.
However, you may have noticed that even if it works once, reopening the same thread often gets stuck at the same point again.
The Solution: Use “Projects” to Manage and Continue Your Conversations
ChatGPT now offers a handy feature called “Projects.” By using it, you can break free from thread limits and instead build up a long-term, structured interaction.
Benefits of using Projects:
- Continue conversations even if one chat gets stuck
- Organize information by topic or file
- Accumulate knowledge that persists across chats
Step-by-Step Guide: Moving to a Project-Based Workflow
Here’s a step-by-step guide (with screenshot suggestions) to help you make the switch.
1.When you see “Your chat is full” or it’s stuck on “Starting…”
If the chat is just full, can I continue using it afterwards? However, the message saying “full” keeps appearing, which is annoying. Also, if “Starting” remains, it will always resume from there, which is useless.
If there is content in that thread that I want to reuse, please output it as knowledge. I think either a table or Markdown format would be fine.
2.Create a New Project
From the left sidebar, click “+ New Project”.
Give your project a name and click Create.
3.Add a Chat to the Project
Inside a project, you can create multiple chats. This makes it easy to separate conversations by topic or task.
4.Upload Files to the Project
Projects allow you to upload files such as PDFs, Word documents, or text files. This enables ChatGPT to access and reference your materials during the conversation.
Thread Memory vs. Project Knowledge
You might feel that continuing in the same thread helps ChatGPT “remember” better.
However, when using Projects with files, you’re building more reliable and structured knowledge.
Rather than relying on a thread’s short-term memory, you’re feeding in referenceable knowledge that persists and is accessible across chats.
I also add things that I have stopped using to my project under “Starting.”