A household file template is the first thing to put in a Household project: one place in your AI assistant that knows your family, so you stop explaining it from scratch in every chat. Here’s why it’s worth setting up, what goes in it and how to build yours with two prompts.
Most people use AI one question at a time. You open a chat, explain who’s in the house, mention the allergy, list what the kids are into, get an answer and close it. Next week you do it all again.
A Household project ends that. You tell it about your family once, and every question after that starts from what it already knows.
Why set up a Household project
Every new chat starts close to empty. Some assistants remember bits of past conversations, but you don’t decide what they keep, and family details end up mixed in with everything else you’ve asked about.
A project is different. You choose exactly what it knows, you can read it and you can fix it when something changes. Ask it to plan breakfasts and it already knows who can’t eat what. Ask about gifts and it already knows what everyone’s into.
I keep everything for our house in one Household project: our recipes, the kids’ learning, our finances and a household file at the top. When I have a question about the house, I don’t have to remember where anything lives. There’s one place to ask.
What a Household project is
A project is a workspace inside your AI assistant. ChatGPT and Claude both have them. You add files once, and every chat you start inside the project can read them.
A Household project is one of those for your whole house. It holds two kinds of things:
- A household file. One short document about your family: who lives there, food rules, what the school sends, what everyone likes and what the kids do each week. This is the template, and it’s what you’ll build below.
- Everything else the house runs on. Recipes, appliance manuals, school calendars, report cards, trip plans, the budget, the lawn care schedule. You add these over time.
Start with the household file. Everything else can wait.
Step 1: Create the project
Open your assistant and look for Projects in the sidebar. Make a new one and call it Household.
That’s it for now. You’ll come back and add the file once it’s written.
No projects in your assistant? You can still build the household file below. Paste it at the start of a chat when you need it.
Step 2: Build your household file with two prompts
The household file covers four jobs to start:
- School emails. What to flag and what to skip.
- Meals and recipes. Food rules, who cooks and how you like recipes written.
- Gifts and shopping. Who you buy for, what they like and what to avoid.
- Kids’ activities. Lessons, practice and the weekly rhythm.
It isn’t an emergency binder, and it isn’t a place for account numbers, passwords or logins.
It’s written in Markdown, which is just plain text with simple headings. You don’t need to learn it. The assistant writes it for you.
Prompt 1: ask what your AI already knows
Open a new chat outside the project, so the assistant can use anything it already remembers about you. Paste this:
List everything you remember about my household and family: people, schedules, schools, activities, food, stores, dates and how I like answers. Group it under headings. Then list what you're unsure about or might have wrong.Read the unsure list closely. Mine caught most of what was wrong or missing. That list becomes your to-do list for the next step.
If your AI has no memory yet, that’s fine. It may tell you it doesn’t know anything about you. Keep going. Prompt 2 interviews you and builds the file from your answers.
Prompt 2: turn it into a household file
Stay in the same chat so it can see what it just told you. Paste this:
Now help me turn that into a household file I can save as a Markdown file and add to a Project.
Focus on what you'd need to help with four jobs: school emails, meals and recipes, gifts and shopping, and kids' activities. Compare what you know against those jobs, then ask me about the gaps a few questions at a time. If you don't know much about my household yet, start from scratch and interview me. Ask me to confirm anything that might be out of date.
Leave out work and anything that isn't about running the household. Never write account numbers, passwords or logins.
When we're done, write the file in Markdown with clear headings. Start with a short note to the assistant: what this file is, a "last updated" date and a reminder to ask before assuming anything. End with "Still to fill in" and a "Review on" date one month out.Mine opened with a gap check: “Here’s the gap check against the four jobs, then the first batch of questions.” For each job, it listed what it had and what was missing. Then it said, “Let’s start with what’s most likely stale,” and asked four questions. After my answers, it asked four more.
If your assistant doesn’t remember much about you, the prompt tells it to start from scratch. It should say so and ask a few basics first, like who lives with you and how you like answers.
Give it as much detail as you can. The more your file holds, the better every answer gets later. Keep answering until it runs out of questions. If you don’t know something yet, it goes under “Still to fill in” so you can come back to it.
Talking works too. I answered with voice-to-text, using an app called Wispr Flow. You talk the way you’d talk to a person and just give your thoughts. It doesn’t need to be perfect or tidy, and the assistant still gets what you mean. If typing is the thing stopping you, talk.
What my household file looks like
These are the headings my file ended up with, in order:
- Note to the assistant
- People
- Food rules (check before any recipe or meal plan)
- School emails (this year’s classes and a teacher list)
- Meals and recipes (with how I like recipes formatted)
- Gifts and shopping
- Kids’ activities
- Travel (dates to plan around)
- Still to fill in
- Review on (one month out)
If you’d rather skip the chat, those headings are the template. Copy them into a blank file and fill in what you know.
Here’s what a few sections say, with names and private details taken out. Quotes are copied from the file; the rest is summarized.
Real example, from my file on October 23, 2026.
Note to the assistant (trimmed): “This file is the household reference for [my] family. It covers four jobs: school emails, meals and recipes, gifts and shopping, and kids’ activities. Nothing here is about work.” … “Facts drift (grades, levels, teachers, routines), so ask before assuming anything that isn’t confirmed here, and never write account numbers, passwords or logins into this file.”
School emails, “Flag these”: anything with a due date, any grade below 80, teacher questions that need a reply, fee deadlines, field trips. “Everything else can be skipped.”
Meals: I cook weeknight dinners and do all the grocery shopping. Saturday is pancake or waffle day on the outdoor griddle. Extra pancakes get frozen for weekday breakfasts. Batch cooking on the griddle happens at least once a week.
Gifts, for my wife: “Doesn’t follow electronics, so pick practical tech she’d actually use.”
Kids’ activities: weekly piano lessons and daily practice for both kids, and a weekly one-on-one night with one kid at a different boba place each week.
If you borrow one line, make it the school email flag list. It names five kinds of message worth your attention and lets the rest go.
Check before you save it
Read the file once before you add it to the project. Five things to look for:
- Skim for things that don’t belong. The prompt keeps it to household jobs, but read it anyway and delete anything you don’t want every household chat to know.
- Confirm anything marked stale. Grades, lesson days, teachers and routines drift. If the assistant flagged something as unsure, check it before you save.
- No account numbers or passwords. The prompt asks it to leave them out. Look anyway.
- Make sure safety details name the right person. Allergies and food rules should say exactly who they apply to.
- Set the Review on date. One month out works. Put a reminder on your calendar so it doesn’t sit there forever.
Step 3: Add the file to your Household project
Copy the file into a notes app or a text file and save it with a name ending in .md, like household.md. Then open your Household project and add the file to it.
From now on, start your household questions inside that project. When the file changes, replace the copy in the project, or the assistant can end up planning around last month’s lesson schedule.
Step 4: Grow it over time
The household file is the first thing in the project, not the last. When something comes up, add it beside the file: appliance manuals, your recipes, report cards and school calendars, trip plans, the budget, the lawn care schedule.
Keep it all in the one project. Splitting the house across several projects means each one only knows its slice, and you’re back to remembering where things live.
What it looks like once your AI knows your family
I asked my Household project to plan the kids’ weekday breakfasts for next week and didn’t mention any food rules. Every breakfast came from a recipe already in my collection, and every morning worked around our food rules. It also warned me about one store-bought ingredient that usually breaks them, made a grocery list and saved the plan in my recipes folder. Here’s the week it planned:
Real example, from my Household project on October 23, 2026.
- MondayBreakfast hash with sausage and sweet potato, plus avocado
- TuesdayBlackberry Greek yogurt parfaits
- WednesdayBreakfast burritos from the freezer
- ThursdaySaturday’s leftover pancakes with sausage patties
- FridayBanana muffins with a Greek yogurt bowl
- Sunday prepAbout an hour and a half, with one batch of homemade sausage, so each school morning is a two to five minute reheat.
That’s the payoff of telling it once.
What to try next
Once the project knows your family, each of the four jobs is easier to hand off.
- School emails. Turn school emails into one list, and your flag list tells the assistant which ones matter.
- Meals and recipes. Ask what you can make with what you have, or plan a week of griddle meal prep, with your food rules in place.
- Gifts and shopping. Set a Christmas gift budget with each person’s interests on file.
- Kids’ activities. With lessons and practice in the file, you can ask the assistant to lay out the week around them.
Get the blank household file template
Prefer to skip the prompts? The blank household file template has the same headings as mine, ready for you to fill in. Type your answers in yourself, or paste it into a chat and have your assistant ask you the questions.
Saving your copy needs a Google account. The two prompts on this page stay free to copy without signing up.
The Household project is step one of the Household AI Setup. If you’d like help setting yours up, I do a few 1:1 sessions a month.
Start your Household project today
You don’t need the whole house in it this week. Make a project called Household, run the two prompts and add your file. Then ask it something you’d normally have to explain first, like what to make for dinner this week. When the answer already knows your family, you’ll see why it’s worth it.
After that, add one thing at a time as it comes up: a manual when something breaks, the school calendar when it arrives, a recipe you want to keep. The project gets more useful every time you do.
AI assistants can make mistakes. Check names, dates and food rules in your file before you rely on them.
