Summary
Jeff Su, a former Google product manager turned productivity creator, delivers a practical walkthrough of ChatGPT Work Desktop — OpenAI’s agentic productivity application that connects ChatGPT to external tools including Google Calendar, Gmail, Notion, Slack, and Spotify. The core concept Su introduces is agents.md: a plain-English rulebook stored as a markdown file that ChatGPT Work reads before every task, allowing rules to persist across sessions without re-stating them in each prompt. A birthday calendar example demonstrates this — rules like “add a cake emoji” and “include a gift reminder” carry forward automatically into brand new sessions.
The tutorial covers practical setup in detail: downloading the desktop app, creating the project folder, naming the agents.md file exactly right (ChatGPT Work won’t recognize it otherwise), and connecting plugins. Su demonstrates live workflows including cross-referencing an apartment lease to create a properly formatted calendar event, and shows how to keep agents.md lean by offloading tool-specific rules into a separate tool-conventions.md file — important because a bloated agents.md means worse outputs and wasted tokens on every task.
Specific plugin rules are demonstrated for Gmail (skip sign-offs to avoid duplicate signatures), Notion (use existing database templates), and Slack (format thread summaries into decisions, action items, and open questions). Su also explains the side panel’s three distinct functions — file preview and editing, a built-in browser, and a side chat for keeping intermediate reasoning separate from the main conversation — and draws a clear distinction between the less capable ChatGPT Work Web and the more powerful desktop version he recommends for non-technical users.
📺 Source: Jeff Su · Published August 25, 2026
🏷️ Format: Tutorial Demo
