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The Settings Most People Never Change (And Should)
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
Most people's settings are whatever they were the day the account was
created — untouched not because they were reviewed and judged correct, but
because reviewing them never made it onto the list of things to do. Default
settings are chosen to be reasonable for the largest possible number of
people, which by construction makes them not particularly well suited to
any one of them.
The rule: default settings are a starting point chosen for someone else's
habits, not a decision made about yours — a short, occasional audit is worth
more than reacting to the one setting you happen to trip over.
The mechanism: the Quarterly Settings Audit
Go through these in order, roughly every few months, or whenever something
about how you use the tool has changed:
- Memory and personalisation. Is it holding the right things? Anything
built up from a period that no longer reflects how you work is worth
trimming, and anything useful that hasn't been captured is worth adding
deliberately rather than hoping it accumulates on its own.
- Connected apps and permissions. Anything connected that you no longer
use is worth disconnecting — not because it's actively risky, but because
an unused connection is one more thing to account for later with no
corresponding benefit now.
- Style or tone preferences. If you've settled on how you like answers
formatted or phrased, check whether that's actually been saved as a
standing preference or whether you're still re-explaining it fresh each
session out of habit.
- Notification and data settings. Worth a periodic look simply because
these are the settings most likely to have changed on the provider's
side since you last checked, independent of anything you did.
- Privacy and data-use controls. Whether your conversations are used to
help train models, and what's retained and for how long, are worth
knowing deliberately rather than by default — see the guide on privacy
settings that matter for the fuller version of this one.
What to skip
Skip treating this as a one-time setup task — the point of calling it
quarterly is that both your habits and the product's defaults keep moving,
and a setting checked once two years ago tells you very little about now.
Skip changing settings you don't understand just because a guide (this one
included) mentions them; look at what the setting actually does before
switching it.
Guardrails
- Exact settings, their names, and where they live in the interface change
between product versions — treat the categories above as what to look
for, not literal menu labels, and check the current interface directly.
- Some settings differ meaningfully between a personal account and a
workspace or enterprise one, sometimes controlled by an administrator
rather than by you — if a setting seems locked or missing, that's often
why.
- None of this is a security audit in the formal sense — for genuinely
sensitive use (regulated data, client confidentiality obligations), that
needs its own dedicated review, not a quarterly personal check.
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