Computer History explained honestly, the five things worth asking it, and a skill that finds the work you keep repeating and tells you exactly what to build instead.
ChatGPT can now reference what you were doing before you ever opened ChatGPT. It is called Computer History, and it turns activity in the apps and sites you choose into something ChatGPT and Codex can actually use.
Most of what it can do is small and convenient. One thing it can do is genuinely different, and that is the last section of this guide.
Check whether you can even use it first. Right now it is macOS only, in the United States only, and on the Pro, Business and Enterprise plans. It is not available in the EU, Switzerland or the UK. On Business and Enterprise an admin has to allow it before you will see it. It is off by default and you turn it on under Settings, Computer History.
What it actually watches, because it is less invasive than the name suggests. It records clicks, typing, keyboard shortcuts and when you switch between apps. It does not take screenshots. It does not record your screen. It never touches your microphone or system audio, and it skips private browsing entirely. You pick which apps and sites are included.
You stay in control of the record. There is a timeline view where you can look at what it captured, delete individual entries, or clear the last ten minutes, the last hour, the last day, or everything.
The part worth knowing before you turn it on. The memory files it builds are stored on your Mac as plain, unencrypted text, which means other software running under your account can read them. OpenAI's own documentation recommends against using this with health, financial or personal information. So choose the apps you include on purpose, and leave your banking and medical stuff out of it.
The first four save you a few minutes each. The fifth is the one that changes something.
Here is why the fifth one matters more than the other four. You cannot see your own repetition. Every instance of a repeated task feels like a one-off in the moment, so the thing you do eleven times a week never registers as a workflow. It just feels like Tuesday.
This skill reads the history as sequences instead of events, ranks what it finds by how much time each pattern actually costs you per week, and then sorts each one into automate, turn into a reusable skill, delegate, delete, or leave alone. That sorting step is the important part, because plenty of repetitive work should not be automated and some of it should just stop.
Then, for your top three, it writes the first version of the thing you should build instead of telling you that you could build something.
Give it a full week before you run it. Two days of history produces a confident answer built on nothing, which is worse than no answer. The skill is written to tell you when the data is too thin, but a week of real work is where it starts being useful.
Once it hands you something worth building, this walks through turning it into an actual skill.